Illusory
by Marston Chicklet
Summary: Hermione didn't expect her first vacation in years—Vegas doesn't count—to include kidnap, a man who is supposed to be dead, or Lucius Malfoy—but no one asked her opinion. Written for pigwidgeon37 in the 2007 Winter SSHG Exchange.
1. Prologue

Title: Illusory

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Possible waterboarding of the English language, for which I profusely apologise, and some minor slashy bits.

For the prompts: 1) Some time during the Battle of Hogwarts, Hermione feels compelled to go back to the Shrieking Shack. Snape's body is gone. There are a few more of his memories clinging to the blood on the floor, though. Hermione collects them. What they are, what she does with them and when, is up to the author. Snape is, of course alive.

3)After the Battle, Lucius goes back to the Shrieking Shack and finds an almost-dead Severus. He takes him to a secret location (author's choice) and remains there with him. Hermione Granger, debutante divorcee after 25 years of marriage and now head of Magical Law Enforcement, takes a well-deserved holiday very near the secret location. Threesome ensues

Notes: Thanks to thehalflie, as well as the person who spent hours coming up with wildly improbable car accident scenarios with me, although I doubt that he realises what it went towards.

Prologue

_And there are corpses,_

_feet made of cold and sticky clay,_

_death is inside the bones,_

_like a barking where there are no dogs,_

_coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,_

_growing in the damp air like tears of rain._

'Nothing But Death' – Pablo Neruda

———

The Shrieking Shack was empty.

Hermione Granger took note of this fact with the special brand of cool, distant logic that can only exist in the mind of one who has yet to process the meaning behind specific information.

Not only was the place devoid of life, but also of the dead. The body was gone.

As she paced methodically through the various rooms, comprehension gradually dawned.

The body was gone, but why? Surely it would need to be analysed for cause of death, dissected for physical hints of motive. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the concept registered as 'wrong', but her grip on morality had never been weaker.

She re-entered the room in which she had last seen it and examined the floor, where the rusted colour of dried blood mingled with the greying floorboards. Later, the memory of the scent that lingered in the room would bury itself in her hair and stain her clothes—she would become a pathetic parody of Lady Macbeth, waking up in the night to running water as she reached for an absent bar of soap—but at the moment it barely registered. She needed to find the body.

What she would do with it, once found, remained unclear. She was acting purely on impulse and the knowledge that, as survivors banded together in relief, the man who had made the most sacrifices would rot away, forgotten until convenient.

Something glimmered and caught her eye from the hall, making her start in surprise. Cautiously, she approached it, then recognised it for what it was and transfigured a bauble from the dresser into a vial. Moving mechanically, she scooped the silvery fluid into it with her wand and began hunting for any more that might have been missed. The trail of blood and memory led her down the stairs and to the back door, where she found herself face to wand with Narcissa Malfoy.

"Say one word and I'll—"

"Mum," Draco hissed, forcibly lowering her arm as he slipped through the door. "She's alright. She won't hurt us, will you, Granger?"

Hermione barely reacted to his menacing tone, except to cap the vial and slide it into her pocket. "You're too late," she told them in a hoarse voice that she half-expected to break. "Someone's taken the body."

Narcissa's lip curled into a derisive sneer and she looked as though she was about to say something, but her son beat her to it. "Father did—he said that Uncle Severus should be taken care of by friends or the nearest thing he has."

"Oh," was the best she could manage.

"That doesn't mean Potter," Draco added helpfully.

There was a moment of silence as Hermione digested this. It seemed straightforward enough, but she felt that she was missing something, some important point that would pass her by if her panic-addled, sleep-deprived mind didn't catch it now.

Some of this desperation must have shown, since the next thing Draco said was, "Granger? Are you okay?"

He started to take a step towards her, but his mother held him back. "I hear someone."

"Don't worry," Hermione said, trying to be comforting, "I'll tell them what he did."

"No, Granger, you can't! You've got to—"

"Draco, there isn't time—"

"Please, don't tell them that Father—"

There was a flash of red and, before Hermione could register what, precisely had happened, Narcissa was dragging her Stunned son through the door. She paused before it closed, locking eyes with the younger woman as she said, perhaps a touch dismissively, "You'll do the right thing, I'm sure."

She blinked and they were gone.

"Hermione?" Luna's whispery voice echoed through the house, which, paradoxically, felt even emptier than it had before.

The grip on her arm was as surprisingly firm as it was sudden, and Hermione found herself off-balance and stumbling as she was led to the tunnel entrance.

"I told them you'd be here, but they didn't listen; everyone's convinced you've been caught by a leftover Death Eater."

Her head was throbbing and the scent of blood seemed to stick in her nostrils, even as they left the Shrieking Shack and began the walk—which had seemed so short in her earlier panic—back to Hogwarts.

"Is something wrong?" Luna paused to glance at her, wide-eyed, as though she were properly seeing Hermione for the first time.

"Of course not," Hermione replied, less weakly than she felt, then promptly did the only thing that seemed reasonable at the time: fainted.

She heard the voices before she saw their sources; they fluctuated like a poorly tuned radio that had run out of batteries, but she could pick out words like 'body', 'trial', and 'provisional government'. Memories came rushing to the surface, too rapidly for her to process, and she opened her mouth to speak but all that came out was a horrible croaking sound.

Several voices cried out her name, and by the time she managed to pry her eyes open Ron, Harry, Ginny, Bill, Neville, and Luna were staring down at her with varying degrees of the same expectant expression.

"What happened?" she managed.

"What were _you _doing in the Shrieking Shack?" Ron demanded. "Have you gone completely mental?"

She tried to prop herself up on her elbows, but found that it increased her headache tenfold, so slid back down. "I was…"

What _had _she been doing? She remembered an empty room with bloodstains on the floorboards, scooping up leaked bits of memory… and Draco and his mother.

"I went…"

Another moment, and all of the urgency that Draco had shown was rushing through her veins. He had been afraid of her doing something…

"I wanted… to bury Snape's body."

A moment of panic struck, and she reached into the pocket of the jeans that she was still wearing—had been wearing for how long? Her hand met the smooth glass of a vial, which she fingered for a moment, grateful for the blanket that obscured the motion from view.

"And?" Harry prompted sharply.

"And I did."

A collective sigh of relief seemed to fill the room, but it did nothing to ease the rolling fear that was filling her stomach to match the scent of old blood that in her nostrils. God help her, she had just lied to save a Malfoy's arse. Three Malfoy arses, to be precise.

"I think I'm…" She trailed off and leaned over the edge of the bed; Bill held out a bucket for her to retch in and she would have given him a smile of thanks if there had been time.


	2. Chapter 1

Thanks, as always, to thehalflie for the fabulous beta.

Part One

It wasn't that Hermione Granger didn't love her children; really, she did. Unfortunately, she was contemplating revising this heretofore accepted fact to exclude right before she was due to leave on her first vacation in five years, when she was packing, before eight in the morning, or any combination of the aforementioned situations. She would also have preferred for them to remain children, as opposed to opinionated, persistent adolescents.

And, at this precise moment, she was primarily referring to Rose.

"I can't believe that you won't leave me alone here—you'll only be gone a week." Rose hovered over her mother, who was flinging clothes into a suitcase.

"You can discuss it with your father, if he manages to show up," Hermione said. "It wasn't my idea."

"Or Teddy," she continued. "Why can't I stay with him in Hogsmeade?"

Everyone had told her that they had survived the worst once Rose had turned fourteen. This, Hermione had discovered, was a bald-faced lie designed to give desperate parents false hope: sixteen was infinitely worse.

"Because your father wants you to spend time with his family," she snapped. "Apparently he thinks that you've had quite enough to do with mine."

She thought it was rather diplomatic of her not to mention that Molly Weasley, who was anxious to remove Rose from Hermione's poisoning influence, had engineered the entire thing. Hermione sometimes fantasised a life without her ex-in-laws, in which divorce made life easier, not more difficult, and dodging hexes in Diagon Alley remained a distant war memory.

"But I don't _want _to stay with them," Rose complained. "Nan always invites her friends over for tea and I have to sit around and let them sniff about my clothes and my haircut and then…" Rose paused for dramatic effect. "Do you know what she makes me do?"

Hermione sighed wearily, knowing all too well what was coming. "She makes you do the washing up?"

"Exactly!"

"My mum makes you do the washing up, too," Hermione pointed out, trying in vain to be fair, although she was perfectly aware that doing the washing up for Molly was an experience like no other.

"But I _like _Granny."

"You know that your Nan means well." It hurt her teeth, but Hermione knew that she had no choice—it was one of those motherly things that simply had to be said.

Rose glanced at her slyly. "Which is why you told Dad that she gets off on making other people miserable because it's the only power she managed to have when she wasn't busy breeding?"

She opened her mouth to object, but realised that there was no point in it—Rose brought new meaning and emphasis to stubborn. Annoyed deflection seemed to be the better option. "Speaking of, where is your Dad? Can you try Flooing him to see if he's on his way?"

"Fine," Rose replied with a smirk as she flounced into the hall. "But, just so you know, Nan thinks you're a silly little upstart with an ego that takes out small bridges. She told me so last time I visited."

With a heavy sigh, Hermione sank down on the bed, not wanting to admit that Rose had touched on a sore spot. She didn't _want _to leave Rose behind at the Burrow, to be subjected to the nagging of Molly Weasley as Ron half-forgot her (as he always did); it was something that had happened to her often enough that she wouldn't wish it on her worst enemy. And, well, it wasn't as though her relationship with her ex-husband's family could get much worse—even Ginny had stopped talking to her after the volcanic eruption at Al's birthday last year…

"Mum!" Rose called from the kitchen. "Dad says he's caught up at work and wants to know if you can take me to the Burrow before you leave."

If Hermione had given herself a minute to think things through, the words that followed might have remained little more than a vague idea hanging in the back of her mind. But she didn't, which was why she found herself shouting back, "Tell him that I say absolutely not. If he wants you to visit so badly, he can be here in the next fifteen minutes. Otherwise, you're coming with me."

————

Ron, unsurprisingly, didn't make it. There was a brief shouting match through the fireplace, in which Ron threatened to sue and Hermione pointed out that it was pretty sodding difficult to sue the person in charge of Magical Law Enforcement when they didn't even have an official visitation agreement and that if he felt so strongly about having partial custody, he ought to have bothered with it during the court proceedings. It took five minutes for him to agree to sign the document that would allow Rose to leave the country.

Rose, Hermione was fairly certain, had never thrown together a suitcase so quickly in her life and within half an hour they had Apparated to Dover, just in time to catch a ten o'clock ferry to Calais.

Which was why Hermione was currently bearing witness to her daughter's slightly suicidal tendencies.

"This is fucking brilliant," Rose said, remarkably calm in spite of the fact that she was dangling—no, practically falling—off of the boat. "I love that we're doing this the Muggleway."

Hermione opened her mouth automatically to correct her daughter's language, then decided against it. "Please try not to kill yourself. Your father might actually be able to sue me if you did."

Rose laughed. "You know that you're supposed to be fair and pretend you aren't bitter towards Dad, right? Because you're not doing an entirely good job of it."

"Which you absolutely are not going to tell him because I'm taking you to Italy and the only place he's ever taken you was camping in the Lake District." Hermione had to suppress a shudder at the memory; that had been Ron's last-ditch attempt to salvage their marriage and had also been the weekend she decided that if his idea of romance involved snakes and insects and mud and children interrupting them three times during the night, then there had clearly been some sort of dire miscommunication.

"That wasn't too bad," Rose protested, "but I think that Hugo was pretty annoyed at wrecking his favourite shoes. Anyway, you're forgetting the week in Vegas."

This time, Hermione actually had to close her eyes against the images that her daughter's reminiscing produced. Vegas had been possibly the largest disaster of their relationship, besides the actual marriage itself: Ron had binged on the margaritas, incurred enough suspicion at his massive winnings at the casino to have them tailed by a member of the Mafia, and nearly been charged for sexually assaulting a showgirl.

"I think," she remarked dryly, "that I was _trying _to forget Vegas."

"Oh, c'mon, Mum. You've got to admit that Dad chasing the man who tried to chat you up across the stage and bowling over the dancer was hysterical. Especially when we had to go to the police station to bail him out."

"Rose, that was _not_ funny," Hermione admonished. "It was completely humiliating."

"All the girls in my dorm thought it was—I showed them Dad's mug shot."

In ordinary circumstances, Hermione might have been annoyed at her daughter, but the sun was out, making the wind that whipped her hair feel less harsh, and Rose's enthusiasm was infectious. "And where did you get that?"

"I printed it off of the database while you were performing that memory charm on the police officers and the showgirl."

Hermione had a number of things to say about that statement, including how, precisely, she had seen the memory charm when she was supposed to be waiting outside with Hugo and who had taught her how to use a computer—although that was likely to be the doing of Rose's grandparents—but she supposed that there was no point in being angry over something that had happened three years ago. Not to mention that she was privately pleased at her daughter's cleverness.

"You're not upset that I did that, are you?"

Hermione couldn't help it—she let out a small, hiccoughing giggle.

"Good," Rose said, "because Dad was such an idiot about the entire thing that he deserves to have the picture passed around on his ninetieth birthday and I want to be the one to do it."

She briefly wondered about the bitterness in Rose's voice when she mentioned her father, but ignored it as some sort of private feud between the two of them. When—and if—Rose wanted to bring it up, she would.

————

Rose shifted in the bed of her hotel room, restless. It wasn't the noise of the city—she'd grown used to that during summers with her mother in London—but simply that the city was _there_ and that she was anxious to see it. She hadn't anticipated a holiday this exciting until she was done with school and able to plan it for herself, so the fact that it was her mother's doing increased her level of surprise.

It wasn't that she didn't get along with Hermione; it was that their relationship had always been a bit distant, even after the divorce—especially after the divorce—and neither of them had really wanted to push boundaries that they both knew to be fragile. The only exception had been one afternoon during the summer after her second year at Hogwarts, when Rose had come inside after playing Quidditch with Hugo to find her mother huddled on the couch, rocking back and forth with silent sobs. There had been an almost automatic moment of comfort, where she had stepped into the waiting embrace and felt her shoulder grow increasingly wet until she felt it was necessary to step back. She had thought that was a nice summary of her mother's personality: private and quietly controlled emotion, except when she was angry. When she was angry, she was terrifying.

Today, however, she had caught a glimpse of a Hermione that she had thus far been unaware of. This version was capable of making spontaneous decisions, giggling as though she were twenty years younger, and letting her guard down. It had made her wonder—briefly, because he thought felt like a betrayal—whether that was the Hermione that her father had fallen in love with. Before that morning, Rose had never considered her mother to be pretty—she had always looked too tired, too stretched thin—but thinking back to her sparkling eyes and windswept hair on board the ferry it seemed difficult to imagine her otherwise.

She shifted around for a while, trying to find a comfortable position, but to no avail. Finally giving up on sleep, she slipped out of bed and tugged on her bathrobe, snatching up the room key that she had been given 'just in case' before padding down the corridor. Her mother didn't sleep well most nights, so with any luck she'd still be awake.

Upon first entering the room, she thought that perhaps her mother had slipped out after all: the room was dark, she could no longer hear the traffic, and hardly anything seemed to be disturbed. She would have turned to go if there hadn't been a slight movement on the bed accompanied by the rustling of bed sheets.

"Mum?" Rose whispered, feeling her way to the edge of the bed. "Are you asleep?"

A faint mumble was the only reply.

"Okay, I'm going back to bed, then. Goodnight."

Rose patted the lump in the bed affectionately as she stood to go, bumping the nightstand. Something hard clattered to the ground and Rose fumbled to find it, swearing softly as her hand closed around something smooth and glassy. Hoping that she hadn't chipped it, she set it back on the table and slid back out in the hallway.

————

Sleeping past eight was a luxury that Hermione had seldom allowed herself. Sleeping, in general, was hard to come by and she didn't believe that tacking on an extra hour here and there actually did her any good. Still, she thought, basking in the sounds of the square below her window without opening her eyes, if being properly rested made her feel this much better, she ought to try it more often. She wasn't sure how long she lay there, drifting in and out of awareness, but was eventually brought around by the sound of the door swinging open.

"Morning, Mum!" Rose announced. "Actually, it's just after twelve, but I didn't want to wake you. It's your vacation, after all."

Hermione pried open her eyes and was greeted by the sight of her daughter, cheery and bright eyed being handed two mugs by a dark-skinned boy who was gazing at Rose, wide-eyed. She forced herself up onto her elbows and grimaced. "Morning."

"This is Marco," she added, by way of introduction. "I met him at the café in the square and I convinced him to bring us up cappuccinos for breakfast. Marco, this is my mother."

"Hermione Granger," she said and extended a hand to shake.

He grasped it, looking between mother and daughter in confusion.

"Mum, he's got a Vespa, and he offered to give me a tour of Florence. Is that all right with you?" Rose passed her one of the mugs and Hermione clutched at it, trying desperately to wake up.

"I don't know…"

"I promise to be back by five and I've got my wand with me." Her eyes grew wider, more pleading.

With a sigh, Hermione realised that saying no would be somewhat hypocritical, especially since she herself had been fantasising about finding a young Italian lover for the week. It looked less likely with her much younger and prettier daughter alongside her, but it didn't mean that the girl wasn't allowed to have fun. Besides, Rose _was _nearly seventeen and more than capable. "I suppose."

There was a squeal and Hermione nearly dropped the cappuccino as Rose smothered her with a hug. "I'll be careful, I promise!"

————

Walking through the streets, Hermione had felt somewhat out of place; she had made a conscious effort to avoid the stereotypical tourist garb and, as a result, raided Rose's suitcase for a skirt and heels to wear with the red silk blouse that she hadn't had a chance to wear since well before the divorce. It was far enough removed from her typical clothing choice to make her faintly uncomfortable, but also liberated.

It had been with a stab of horror that she realised precisely how middle-aged her wardrobe had become—she was mere years away from shoulder pads and embroidered nighties at this rate—but it wasn't enough to cancel out the deep satisfaction she felt at the knowledge that she could fit into her daughter's clothes.

Anyway, it was difficult to feel too unsophisticated, no matter how many pairs of khakis one owned, when one was sitting in a wine bar that overlooked a river for lunch.

It had, on occasion, occurred to her that in a life without Ron she might have been able to do this more frequently. Or, even in a life where Ron wasn't allowed to plan vacations—things might have worked out if that had been the case—which led to thoughts about what she would be willing to sacrifice for a villa in Tuscany. The idea that, were she to do it all over, she would have waited a few more years before marrying Ron was a firm certainty in her mind. When she separated the concept from her existing offspring, she knew that she would have liked to ignore the pressure to give Molly Weasley another set of grandchildren, but when she thought of Hugo's sunny, freckled face and summer job with George at Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes and of Rose slyly bending the entire family to her will the thought pattern grew more complicated and left her feeling slightly guilty.

She was saved from following it, fortunately, by her meal and an interloper arriving simultaneously.

The voice came from behind her, making her freeze with its disinterested ability to send her hurtling back over twenty-five years.

"Of all the people whom I expected to discover to have actual taste, you would be on the bottom of the list."

"I did get the divorce eventually, Mr Malfoy," she replied, turning to face him.

At least sixty-five, and he hadn't changed at all, the bastard. In fact, considering that the last time she had seen him— at the trial that had seen him exiled from Britain—he had been fresh out of Azkaban and a war, he probably looked better. She had heard little more about him than that Narcissa had opted to stay with Draco until her death and that he had taken up residence in his family's Italian properties (undoubtedly bringing a great deal of illegal money with him). Harry had testified alongside her to the family's reluctant support of Voldemort, and he'd thanked her for it and her lie about burying Severus at the end, albeit in a somewhat backhanded manner.

His words had echoed repeatedly in her ears over the course of her marriage: _I'm tempted to think well of you, although if you had a whit of sense you'd forget the Weasley brat._

She still wasn't sure whether he had meant that as advice or insult.

"No need to be so formal—I owe you twice over."

"Or you would if I happened to be the sort of person to remind you of it," she replied, but couldn't help smirking.

"Pity," he remarked, seating himself opposite her without query or invitation. "I'd hoped that your divorce would mean you've finally developed some sense of self-preservation. Unless, of course, he threw you out."

"Not at all. It was an informed decision made by two reasonable adults who found that they were no longer compatible."

Her smug expression lessened a bit as she realised that that was the exact explanation she had given Rose and Hugo. Apparently she made a habit of addressing everyone as though they were her children.

"I'm sure it was. Now, my dear, don't let me distract you from your food—it's growing cold."

"I'm not 'your' anything." She scowled, picking up her fork and twirling the linguine around it. She hated this bit of the conversation, when people asked whether she had kept Ron's name and she had to explain that she had never taken it in the first place.

"Then what shall I call you? You've certainly grown out of 'Miss Granger', and surely you don't go by 'Weasley'."

His tone was condescending enough that she could hit him, but she tried to keep the violence to her voice. "Hermione's fine."

The server interrupted the conversation, and, as Lucius ordered it became unbearably clear that he had no plans of leaving the table anytime in the near future and, even if she did hate him, it would be unforgivably rude to stand up and leave before he had finished.

Besides, he had probably taken over the Mafia in the time he had lived here, and there had been enough trouble with that in Vegas.

———

Rose wished that she could say she was enjoying herself, but she wasn't. The Vespa wasn't nearly as exciting as Uncle Harry's flying motorcycle, and the boy driving it was even duller. Not to mention the language barrier, which had led to the rapid discovery that there were only so many hand gestures that one could perform before she and Marco ran out of things to say.

She had to admit, though, that the city was breathtaking, filled with arches and Medici buildings and bridges stretching over the river that she couldn't begin to describe, and that she was certainly seeing more of it than she would have otherwise—with a gorgeous boy in tow. None of which, she contemplated as Marco parked his scooter and they dismounted, was really something to complain about.

His fingers wrapped around her wrist and he tugged at it gently, sending a tingling jolt through her arm that only intensified when he smiled—he _was _attractive. She followed him mutely, gazing wide-eyed into the shops they passed, until they reached a street market filled with various stands and buskers. Rose could have wandered around for hours without examining any particular thing, but Marco seemed to know exactly where he was going. Never letting go of her, he led the way to a woman with a rack of silk scarves and began a rapid exchange in Italian, gesturing towards her several times, before the woman's face broke into a smile and she selected a dark green scarf to wrap around Rose's neck. She glanced down, admiring the way that the green of the scarf accented her red hair and flowed over her shoulders.

"For me?" she asked, twirling and pointing at herself as she reached for her purse.

Marco shook his head anxiously and she began removing it, bewildered. It wasn't until he had pulled his wallet from his pocket that she understood he meant to pay.

A moment of blinding panic forced her to swat the hand with the money in it away and replace it with a fistful of her own Euros. With any luck, buying things for her meant that he would expect to sleep with her, and she wasn't about to fall for that.

She had heard _all_ about Italian boys from Irene Edgecombe.

"I will pay," he insisted, surprising her with another bout of heavily accented English.

She set her jaw firmly and shook her head. "Thank you, but no presents."

The woman took the money, looking amused, and counted out the change. Marco scowled, but didn't argue. Endeared by his pout—and perfectly aware that it wouldn't be nearly so attractive if he didn't have a foreign accent—she leaned over and spontaneously kissed him on the cheek.

"Weasley! Hey, Weasley! What are you doing here?"

With a glare to match Marco's, she spun around to see two familiar figures rushing towards her.

"The question should be why _you're _here, Malfoy," she snapped, before Al's presence registered. "And _you_. I thought you said you were spending the summer with a friend in Wiltshire."

"Malfoy Manor _is_ in Wiltshire," Malfoy said in his insufferable voice. "We're visiting my grandfather. He lives here."

Al grinned sheepishly. "I didn't tell Dad who I was staying with… And, aren't _you_ supposed to be spending the week with Nan?"

Rose snorted derisively. "Like I'd let Mum do that to me. I convinced her to take me with her—we got in last night."

"And you've found someone to snog already?" Scorpius squinted at her doubtfully, before turning to Marco with a shrug and holding a hand out to shake. "Scorpius Malfoy."

The other boy returned the gesture. "Marco Volpe."

"I'm Al Potter," Al chimed in with an awkward wave. He pointed at Rose, adding, "She's my cousin."

The four of them hovered in an awkward circle, three of them unsure what to say and one of them not sure how to say what he wanted so that the rest would understand.

Finally Scorpius cleared his throat and announced, "We found this great place for gelato."

"Yes, we did," Al agreed. "Rose has never had gelato, have you? At least not proper stuff."

"Considering I've never been to Italy…"

"So, gelato, then," Scorpius said with a firm nod. "Shall we?"

Rose interlocked her arm with Marco's, lagging a step behind two other boys as she watched Al happily recite the architect and history of each building that they passed, oblivious to Scorpius' bemused glances.

————

When Hermione finally glanced down at her watch to see that it was nearly five thirty, she was amazed at how quickly the time had passed. Sometime in the last three hours it had occurred to her that drinks with old enemies was infinitely preferable to drinks with old friends; rather than being polite and obliging by enquiring after every last detail of the last twenty-odd years, old enemies insulted you and rather expected you to return the favour. The only thing that offended them was a sub-par insult, as it led them to believe that they were growing rusty in inspiring hatred. If anything, Lucius' long, occasionally graphic insults were entertaining, even when directed at her; she hadn't laughed this much in _years_.

It also struck her that, after sharing three bottles of wine—Lucius had insisted that the supposed effects of mixing red and white were a lie, which had turned out to be a lie—she might be a little past tipsy.

"I should go," she told him, pushing her chair back but putting off standing. Something told her that she would need to brace herself for that particular venture. "My daughter must be wondering where I've run off to. How much do I owe for the bill?"

"Not a thing, my dear. Consider it my thanks for a pleasant afternoon of nostalgia."

"Right," she said. "I'm happy with that, but it doesn't mean we're even."

"Of course not," he agreed, the corner of his mouth twitching as she tried to stand and had to grab hold of the table. "Didn't your mother ever teach you not to mix your wines?"

"My mother," Hermione replied, trying valiantly to keep the slight slur out of her voice, "demonstrates a strong preference for whisky. So that would be a no."

He chuckled, leaning back and looking irritatingly smug. "I do hope that you'll enjoy the walk back to your hotel."

"I hope that you enjoy it as well, as you'll be coming with me," she retorted, "or else I'll make sure that the second I get back to England some new evidence suddenly comes to light and your case needs to be re-examined."

"They'll have an easy time getting me out of Italy, I'm sure," he replied smoothly.

"They will once they've bribed the Italian Ministry." Hermione held out her hand firmly. "Now walk me back to my room, and if you leave me in an alley somewhere, I'll curse your line until Scorpius' children's children's children will be crying."

He took her arm, and she leaned most of her weight into him as they left the restaurant. He paused once they were outside, fumbling in his pockets until he pulled out a cigarette case.

"You smoke?" It was a faintly surprising revelation; smoking somehow seemed too undignified for him.

"These," he replied, offering one, "don't count."

Hermione squinted at the label as she accepted. "_Designer _cigarettes?" she snorted, holding it out for a light. "You really do have no shame."

"What have I to be ashamed of? It breaks my heart to know that particular one is being wasted on one who can't appreciate the subtle flavour."

She brought it to her lips and inhaled

Most of the walk back was unremarkable, and Lucius remained silent, only letting out the occasional grunt when she leaned on him too heavily.

When they entered the lobby, Lucius remarked, "I suppose that you wouldn't find it at all amusing if I forced you to take the stairs?"

"Scorpius' children," she responded. "And their children. Just think of them."

"Shall I take that as your slight inclination towards the lift, then?"

She smiled into his shoulder as he steered them across the hall and into the enclosure. "You know," she began, once the doors had closed behind them, "there is something that I've been wondering about, but didn't want to discuss in the restaurant."

With her face so firmly mashed against his shoulder, she _felt _him go on the defensive. "Indeed?"

"It's about that night in the Shrieking Shack…" She trailed off as the elevator door opened on the second floor to let in a grey-haired gentleman, who smiled at them politely.

Lucius leaned down to whisper in her ear. "I think that, in that case, you should invite me into your room, at which point we can discuss it."

Some detached part of her mind was reminding her that she wasn't supposed to be this friendly with him—she wasn't even supposed to _like _him—let along want him to keep his mouth pressed to her ear like that, murmuring things in that half-gentle half-dangerous voice of his…

The lift lurched to a stop, causing the spinning of her head to accelerate, and she pointed down the hall to where her room was. Clutching his arm more firmly, she fumbled for her key, but he beat her to a silent _Alohomora_.

"No protection spells?" he asked with a raised eyebrow that looked almost disapproving.

"I hadn't planned on an exciting holiday," she replied sharply, glancing around the room to make sure that Rose hadn't been waiting for her here. "Now, about what I wanted to ask you…"

"One moment." He made sure to firmly lock the door, before casting layers of silencing spells on the walls and ceiling.

"You've forgotten the floor, I think," she commented dryly, pulling a bottle of mineral water from her luggage and pouring it into a paper cup.

"I don't want to suffer as a result of your arrogance," he said tersely, following her advice. "Now, bring up what you will."

Taking a deep breath, she unclasped the chain that hung around her neck and removed the locket that hung from it, transfiguring it into a small, chipped vial that she handed to him. "Inside there are memories—fragments, really—that I found on the floor of the Shrieking Shack before I ran into your wife. I had assumed that they were Snape's, but they seem to be from after we left, when he was already dead… And, well, you're in them. I thought that maybe they were hallucinations, but none of the research that I've done on the subject deals with those. It simply doesn't make any sense."

Lucius stared at the bottle in his hand with something akin to fear. His arm twitched, and she wondered momentarily if he was going to fling it to the ground.

Within a second, his face had smoothed over and he handed it back to her. "What exactly does the memory show?"

"Nothing really—that's the problem. It's disoriented and makes me ill to go into it, but there was your face and some jumbled words, and then everything went black. The only explanation I can come up with is that he was still alive when you retrieved the body, but I don't see how that's possible…"

Now that his expression was cool and expressionless, she could see that it was going to stay that way. Any answers were going to be given involuntarily.

"I sincerely wish that I could provide you with the answers that you seek, but I'm afraid that I am as ignorant in this matter as you. If you don't mind, I'll take down the protective measures and leave you to your holiday."

"Thank you." She changed the vial back into a locket and hung the necklace around her neck once more.

In retrospect, she supposed that that would have been the last she saw of him, if it hadn't been for the owl that swooped in the window a moment later, dropping an envelope on the floor before him before settling on the windowsill. She watched as he retrieved it as though in slow motion, every movement burning itself into her memory. The careful tearing open of the letter, the dart of eyes, the lightening of his already pale complexion to an ashen grey as he collapsed into the bed behind him… If a second owl hadn't swooped in a moment later with an identical letter for her, she would have gone to his side. Instead, hands trembling slightly, she slit her envelope open, and read.

_To Ms Hermione Granger,_

_Please be advised that we have a Miss Rose Weasley currently in our care. Kindly make no attempts to seek her out or report her as missing, for your own wellbeing as well as hers. The terms of her release will follow in three days time._

_Until then, please accept our warmest regards._

The effect was sobering; for a moment she couldn't see past the blinding panic, but reason swiftly took over. "I expect that she's met up with Scorpius, and they thought that they'd try to trick is into believing that they had been taken hostage."

"I thought that Potters were the only ones who tended toward practical jokes—of course Potter's son _would _be with them."

"James?" Hermione asked in surprise. "I thought that he was in Switzerland for the year."

"Not him, the younger one with the ridiculous name."

"_Al_? Harry let _Al _come to Italy with a friend?"

A faint smile of expression of amusement played across his lips. "According to his son, he has. And is it my fault if Potter can't keep his offspring under control?"

"He'll think it is if anything happens to his son," she replied archly. "Absence of guilt—when it actually _is _absent—doesn't block hexes. Anyway, we're sufficiently distracting ourselves from the point, and I'd personally like to know where my daughter is."

"I suppose that it's fortunate the owls haven't flown away, then."

Pulling out her wand, she aimed it at the two owls perched on the windowsill. "_Accio!_" She was rewarded with a jolt shooting up her arm that made her gasp in surprise and pain as her wand clattered to the ground. "What _was _that?"

"I suppose that your wand has been enchanted to reject any spells made with the intent of discovering Rose's whereabouts. You would have noticed before that if it prevented you from doing any magic."

"But that would take _months_ of contact. There's no way a group of kids could have managed something that complex in an afternoon." Even as the words left her mouth, she knew that she wasn't quite able to believe them. Rose was bright, she told herself, so maybe… "See if yours does that as well," she prompted.

"I should think that the answer would be fairly obvious," he drawled, but made his own attempt at Summoning the owls anyway. His response was more verbally colourful, but otherwise the same.

"Fortunately, there is another way to find out where the owl came from." She approached the birds slowly, holding out a hand until one hopped onto her arm. Lucius studied her with a look of vague confusion and interest as she used the other hand to grasp it firmly by the neck and flip it over. "The European Wizarding Communications Covent of 2012 requires that all creatures used as a means of interaction be clearly marked with a nine digit number," she murmured, more for her own benefit than his. "The first five digits signify the region, whilst the final four indicate the emporium and present owner. The seventh digit is six, which means that it's a rented owl."

"I'm pleased to know that someone in international relations has foresight."

"And I'm certain that you'd feel the same way if I told you that the law was based off of my proposal?"

He scowled. "Even dull knives have been known to cut through things; it's what saves them from being thrown out."

"I'm surprised that you think I have so much as a blade. Anyway, I recognise the five-digit code as being from Rome, and I can look the rest up easily enough. The numbers are six-four-nine-six." She let go of the owl, which hooted indignantly.

"We still have no proof that this is where the children are being held." Lucius was staring dispassionately at the bedspread; Hermione wondered how much of his aloofness was due to her and how much was due to fear.

"No," she said, "but somebody had to be in Rome to send the owl, which means that there has to be some record of it. I suppose that we'll have to take a train since we can't do magic, but that's simple enough."

"It's too slow," he snapped. "We'll have lost three hours at least by the time we arrive."

"And I'm sure that you have a better idea? I don't fancy having the Floo network decide that I actually want to end up in the Czech Republic."

His face was taut and he couldn't quite meet her eyes. The last ten minutes had aged him more than the last twenty-five years. "Yes, actually. But we'll have to go to my villa first."

Before she could respond, he had grasped her by the arm and was dragging her towards the door. Relieved that she hadn't set her purse down because she doubted that she could have stopped him, she half-staggered after him.

————

Hermione had always thought that Lucius' morals were the facet of his life that required the most correction. At the moment she was being forced to eat her words—his driving was infinitely worse.

"Why do you even have a _car_?" she demanded, swallowing back bile as they hurtled through Tuscany at inhuman speeds. "Isn't that too horrifically Muggle for you?"

"I've changed." The wind ripping through the windows made it difficult to tell, but she thought she could detect a note of irony.

"I can tell."

"Besides, I needed a hobby and BMWs aren't known for their durability."

"You mean… you fix it up?" The thought of Lucius Malfoy indulging in anything mechanical was almost too much for her. She was beginning to suspect that she had been thrust into some sort of nightmare and briefly contemplated pinching herself.

"It's been a dull twenty-five years." His face was grim as the car flew around a bend and followed an unpaved road that led up to a villa.

"What? No peacocks?" she mocked, using it as an excuse to ignore the bile that was rising in her throat. Motion sickness and anxiety didn't appear to pair well.

"Those," he said tersely, "were my wife's." The car halted abruptly, nearly sending her sprawling across the dash. "Come with me."

She hurried behind him into the villa, taking a moment to orient herself in the surroundings. Her first reaction was that it wasn't nearly as grandiose as she recalled Malfoy Manor, but Malfoy Manor hadn't had a swimming pool that overlooked the vineyards. The house itself was at least four centuries old, but a great deal more inviting than the ancient stone structure. Still, she was surprised at the clean shapes of modern furnishings; he had always seemed the sort to appreciate the ornate.

He led her up a flight of stairs and down a corridor, into a room that she would have missed if he hadn't pulled her through the doorway. "Choose a wand," he ordered, pulling a drawer out of a cabinet.

Rows of antique forks and knives transformed before her eyes into a space crammed full with opened and labelled boxes of wands. Lucius seemed to know which one he wanted; his hand hovered over the drawer for a moment, before snatching a slender one that looked to be nearly twenty inches.

"Compensating for something?" she asked snidely, running her fingers over the collection until she felt glimmer of familiarity.

"I have something to see to, if you don't mind," he remarked, ignoring the comment except for a slight sniff of disdain. "I'll return for you in five minutes."

A degree of tension eased out of her shoulders as the door closed behind him. She was still on edge, but it was easier to concentrate on a single task than worry about where Rose was. The mass of wands seemed to loom before her ominously and she took a moment to stare at it dazedly, before her plunging her hand into them and selecting on at random.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a voice was remarking on the fact that the International Wizarding Institute stated that the maximum limit of the number of wands possessed by one witch/wizard at any given time was three and each had to be registered with the national government, and that Lucius had no business with well over thirty at his disposal, but a firmer voice told her that the less easily they could be tracked the better off they would be. The lot that ran the IWI were all pricks, anyway.

It took three tries for her to find one that produced anything near the results that hers did, and another four after that to find one that _felt _right. It curved nicely on one end to fit her hand and, while it would clearly take some adjusting to—it seemed to cast each spell with a stronger force than her current wand—she hadn't expected anything more. Not sure whether she was supposed to replace the drawer, she sighed and wandered over to the window, gazing out over the Tuscan countryside. This is what she had wanted her first vacation in years to be: scenic and relaxing, with no dashing about on mad quests to rescue people.

Of course, she supposed that if that was the case, she ought to have been more adamant about not having children.

A movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention, and the sight made her gasp. Lucius was marching down the pathway that led to the back entrance, and, even with three floors and twenty-five years between them, there was no mistaking the stride that matched his, even if it wasn't accompanied by black, swooping robes.

————

Rose awoke to a throbbing head and two pairs of eyes staring worriedly into hers.

"What happened?" she asked, pressing her face against the cool surface she was lying on. It vaguely occurred to her that she should be worried about the fact that she didn't know this, but her mind was still to groggy from sleep.

"What's the last thing that you remember?" Al's voice sent a wave of relief crashing over her—he sounded scared, but at least it was familiar.

"Sitting on the steps of the cathedral eating gelato." She tried to recall past that, but couldn't. "You?"

"Same for both of us," Scorpius replied, and she could hear the nonchalant shrug in his voice. "And now we're all in a dungeon."

"Oh, is that what this is?" She could feel small tendrils of panic tugging at her stomach, but she pushed them aside. None of it seemed quite real. "What about Marco? Is he here?"

"He's in the corner behind you. He's Muggle, so whatever they used on us is probably ten times more potent for him." If Rose had been trying to deny the reality of the situation, it appeared that Al was trying to rationalise his way out of it.

"Whatever," Scorpius broke in. "None of us know who he is. He could be involved in this whole thing, for all we know."

"Yes, the sixteen-year-old criminal mastermind that works in his parents' café. I'm sure he engineered the kidnapping." She was perfectly aware that the only reason the blond boy was being so crass was because he was as terrified as she and Al, but it didn't stop her from trembling with rage. "Let's all hang him out to dry because he's a Muggle stranger. Absolutely fucking brilliant idea, Malfoy. I know that I'd feel no guilt if someone ended up dragging his body out of a river."

"Rose…" Al's voice was warning.

"You're lucky that I don't hit girls, Weasley, so why don't you do _me_ a favour and go to hell."

"You aren't that lucky," she shot back, launching herself at him. She was dimly aware of Al shouting in the background for them to stop, but she tuned it out, channelling all of her efforts into pummelling her fists into Scorpius' face. They kept pounding at the air, even after Al had pulled her off and away from the boy curled up on the ground.

It took her another moment to realise that the trembling had grown into deep, overwhelming sobs and that the only thing still holding her upright was her cousin.


	3. Chapter 2

Part Two

Title: Illusory

Recipient: pigwidgeon37

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Possible waterboarding of the English language, for which I profusely apologise, and some minor slashy bits.

For the prompts: 1) Some time during the Battle of Hogwarts, Hermione feels compelled to go back to the Shrieking Shack. Snape's body is gone. There are a few more of his memories clinging to the blood on the floor, though. Hermione collects them. What they are, what she does with them and when, is up to the author. Snape is, of course alive.

3)After the Battle, Lucius goes back to the Shrieking Shack and finds an almost-dead Severus. He takes him to a secret location (author's choice) and remains there with him. Hermione Granger, debutante divorcee after 25 years of marriage and now head of Magical Law Enforcement, takes a well-deserved holiday very near the secret location. Threesome ensues.

Summary: Hermione didn't expect her first vacation in years (Vegas doesn't count) to include kidnap, a man who is supposed to be dead, or Lucius Malfoy—but no one asked her opinion. Now, she has to rescue her daughter from a situation where too many things look familiar and deal with a nightmare that goes back to the aftermath of the final battle.

Notes: Thanks to name withheld, as well as the person who spent hours coming up with wildly improbable car accident scenarios with me, although I doubt that he realises what it went towards.

**Part Two**

_the peacock means order_

_the fighting kangaroos mean madness_

_the oasis means I have struck water_

_positioning of the stamp – the despot's head_

_horizontal, or 'mounted policemen',_

_mean political danger_

_the false date means I_

_am not where I should be_

_when I speak of the weather_

_I mean business_

_a blank postcard says_

_I am in the wilderness_

"Translations of My Postcards" – Michael Ondaatje

Severus Snape wasn't dead. In fact, at the moment he was very much alive, sulking, and somewhat cleverly disguised as Lucius' buxom blond housekeeper as Hermione Granger looked him up and down suspiciously.

All things considered, death might have been preferable.

"And you're sure you can trust her?" Granger asked, a faint note of derision in her voice.

Beside him, he could hear Lucius let out a deep breath of relief. She hadn't guessed. "Would I jeopardise my grandson?"

"What about powerful spells?" she pushed on. "Will she be able to perform those?"

There was a faintly manic glint in her eye that Severus wasn't entirely certain that he liked, although he was certainly willing to admire the way that her calves disappeared above the hem of her skirt. If Lucius was going to annoy him by insisting that he pretend to be a woman, he was at least going to take advantage of the fact by ogling as many unsuspecting women as possible.

"I have complete faith in Helga's abilities," Lucius replied smoothly, "and seeing as my standards in safety and security are higher than yours appear to be, you should take my word."

Severus cringed inwardly. _Helga?_ He was a step away from being forced to dress as a Bavarian barmaid and bringing Lucius pints in order to keep up the façade.

Hermione's face tightened and she moved toward them briskly. "To Rome, then? Shall we get Helga to perform all of the major spells, just in case we're being tracked in ways other than our wands."

Lucius nodded, grasping Severus by the arm and motioning for Granger to do the same. Just before they Disapparated, Severus leaned over and growled in the other man's ear.

"Oktoberfest is only three months away. You couldn't have _waited_?"

Much to his irritation, an amused chuckle was the only reply he received.

———

Dizzy and disoriented—and not just from Apparating—Hermione took a moment to pace the alley that they had arrived in. Truthfully, she hadn't the faintest clue how to read the situation that she was finding herself in. She still hadn't quite wrapped her head around the fact that Rose had been kidnapped and, to add to her bewilderment, she had now seen a dead man walking. A dead man who was very possibly disguised as housekeeper, which might have been slightly more convincing if 'Helga' hadn't spent the entire conversation mutinously silent or if she believed that Lucius would deign to pay someone to clean when house-elves didn't charge a fee for licking the mud off your boots.

She could, of course, be losing her mind, which was perfectly plausible given the present circumstances. It might almost be preferable; she wouldn't have to revisit as many painful memories or rewrite her life's history as a result. There was no reasonable explanation for how Snape could have possibly survived that snakebite, as he had almost certainly been dead when they had left the Shrieking Shack, Harry holding a vial of memory.

_Unless_ a small voice interrupted, i_that's what he wanted you to think…_

"Did you have plans to actually _find _the owl emporium?" The voice that sliced neatly through her thoughts was cruel and seemed to be seeking a nerve, something to throw her off balance.

"It won't take long," she replied, pretending not to notice. "The license numbers that were assigned to the shops are indicative of location, so a mapping spell is simple enough."

Lucius moved closer to Helga, anticipating the coming spell.

"We'll get a taxi," she added firmly. "We have no way of knowing what sorts of tracking spells have been laid on us, and there's no need to exhaust ourselves anyway."

———

"My grandfather will find us," Scorpius was saying firmly. "He'll notice that we've gone."

"But what about my mum and dad?" Al's voice was slightly shaky. "They have no way of knowing what happened to me, and you _know _that your family won't tell them. Your dad and my dad can hardly walk on opposite sides of the street."

"We'll get out of this, okay? Even if no one finds us, there has to be some way to get out."

Rose lay on her back on the other side of the stone room, wrapped tightly in one of the thin blankets that they had found neatly folded on the corner and pretending to sleep. Scorpius was ignoring her—well within reason—and she knew that Al was more upset over her outburst than he was letting on. Marco was still in an unconscious lump, although she had settled one of the quilts over him in hopes of at least making him more comfortable; it was the least she could do for dragging him into this mess.

As she listened to the boys try to comfort one another, she was struck by her own lack of fear in this situation. While being plucked off the street and imprisoned bewildered her slightly, nothing in the situation implied violence. Dinner had appeared in the cell—not dried crusts of bread and water, but enough chicken and potatoes to make her sleepy—and although the sleeping arrangements weren't fantastic, there were no rats running over them or insects crawling out from the mortar. The situation could be significantly worse.

Of course, a room made completely of stone with no doors or windows left her disconcerted at best and claustrophobic at worst, so there was no telling what it would do to her over time.

"Why does your grandfather live here, anyway?"

Rose tuned back in to their conversation, ears pricking up.

"Something to do with the war, I think. It's one of those things that isn't brought up." Scorpius' voice was easy, but there was a hint of irritation buried somewhere in the words.

"My dad doesn't like to talk much about the war either." Rose knew Al well enough to be able to visualise the way that he was picking at his cuticles in thought. "He's always said that he'll tell me about it when I'm older, but I don't suppose I'll ever be old enough."

"You were named after someone he knew then, right? Someone who died?"

Rose knew this bit of the story. Al's names came from two headmasters, two very _brave_ headmasters. There was always a note of irony in her mother's tone during this part of the story, although she'd never bothered to ask why.

"Severus was my dad's friend, I think," Scorpius continued, "but I know the name from somewhere else."

She had, of course, looked this up. In spite of their many differences, she _was _her mother's daughter and had been firmly instructed in the many merits of The Library. On a lark, she had even bothered to memorise the basics of the Dewey Decimal System, before moving onto a brief flirtation with the Library of Congress system.

Albus Dumbledore, she knew, had been the headmaster of Hogwarts when her parents attended, before being killed by Severus Snape, the subsequent headmaster, in what seemed to her to be an act of euthanasia. Severus Snape was later killed in the Battle of Hogwarts by Lord Voldemort's pet snake.

That was the blurb in her mother's battered copy of _Hogwarts: A History_, which had been expensively charmed to update itself with each new edition. Otherwise, there had been a single article on the subject in a decade-old history journal, which discussed turning points in the war, and some snippets in the _Daily Prophet_ during the post-mortem trial. She occasionally wondered if the secrecy surrounding the war was a collective effort to forget: nothing in the library, no stories of bravado from anyone's parents, nothing. All she knew was that Uncle Harry had some sort of ongoing joke with her parents about a sandwich, that her sort-of cousin Teddy had been orphaned, and that her mother shouted nonsense in her sleep.

———

"Well, we're definitely in the dodgy end of the city." Lucius scrutinised the dirty, deserted street that they stood in, found it lacking, and promptly wrinkled his nose.

Muttering something about stating the obvious, Hermione approached the door and peered in.

The owlery was closed for the day, which left Hermione feeling equal parts relieved and annoyed. She hadn't had a plan past this point and neither, she suspected, had Lucius, which meant that they would have to pour their mental energies into coming up with something.

As long as she had something else to think about, she could forget that her daughter had been kidnapped, that Severus Snape was, unless she was hallucinating, still alive, and that Lucius had spent the majority of the cab ride through Rome crammed against her in the back seat with his hand resting on her leg, leaving her with a burning face and an odd fluttering in her stomach.

"We could break in," Hermione suggested, perfectly aware that she was grasping at straws. "The wards can't be much stronger than what will hold off a common thief."

"While standing in the middle of the street?"

"Back alley and cloaking spells," she shot back shortly. "Besides, everyone ought to be eating dinner right now."

"Helga is quite adept at unravelling wards."

'Helga', Hermione thought dryly, seemed to be adept at a lot of things that most servants had nothing to do with. Including Occlumency. But, aware that it was in her best interest not to mention this, she merely nodded curtly and walked towards a gap between the buildings, carefully stepping over a used syringe and holding up her wand for light. She felt someone stumble into her and jumped before realising that it was Helga. Lucius was still standing on the pavement, squinting at the alley doubtfully.

"Tell Princess over there that he hasn't got a choice," she hissed, before turning her back on them and walking along the wall until she found the back door.

The window was high enough that she couldn't quite see in, so she shifted around the trash bins until she was able to crawl onto them and cup her hands around the glass. She found her eyes immediately treated to the less pleasant aspect of owl keeping.

So, an extended Bubble Charm, it would be.

"You're not the only one who's lax with wards." Lucius' breath on the back of her neck nearly made her fall from her perch. He steadied her, then lifted her down as Helga glared. "It's nothing more than the most basic alarm spell and a deadbolt."

"Good," she said shortly, trying not to focus on the way that her heart was pounding.

It was his own bloody fault that she was too irritated to warn him in advance about the storm of owl excretion that welcomed him.

———

The three of them sprinted from the building and hurtled back down the alley, shoving one another forward mutely until the screaming alarms were no longer audible. They collapsed around the back entrance to a restaurant, panting, as a cook eyed them suspiciously and puffed on a cigarette, pausing every so often to flick off the ash. Hermione nudged Helga. "Have you still got the folder?"

The blonde woman held up the manila customer file mutely. Hermione snatched it and flipped it open in a single motion.

Lucius ran a finger through his hair experimentally. "Revolting," he spat, plucking something out. "You really didn't think to warn me?"

"I need to get some sort of amusement out of this situation. Preferably at your expense."

"I'd rather you didn't."

"It says here that the person who rented the owl lives on the other side of the city," Hermione said, tuning out his complaint as she scanned the information before her. "We can hail a cab and be there in hardly any time at all."

"Or," he replied easily, "we can find a nice hotel with a shower, review the information that we have, and come up with a plan of sorts."

"And lose a night?"

"But be more prepared for what we're up against."

Her jaw tightened and her mind reached for some sort of counter-argument, only to discover that nauseating desperation had replaced logic. As her stomach gave a nervous lurch, it occurred to her that the day's events might be sinking in.

———

Scorpius stared at Rose mutely from across the room. She was glaring back, although neither of them wanted to speak or interrupt Al's snoring. The sound seemed horribly out of place in this cold, blank room; it spoke to him of his dormitory, tenting in the garden of Malfoy Manor last summer, and dozing off on the Hogwarts Express. Perhaps he should have found it comforting, but it only made his chest tighten further.

Rose's piercing gaze wasn't helping, either. He knew that she could analyse through his icy exterior and it made him want to provoke her. Ravenclaws, his father always said, were all the same. Cool logic was helpful in a pinch, except when reason set them on the opposite side of the fence. At least you could trust Gryffindors to do the 'right' thing and Hufflepuffs to flock to their friends.

Which was all right, because Scorpius _thought _that they were on the same side, but he couldn't read Rose the way he could Al.

"I lied," he whispered, although the heavy air made him feel as though he was shouting the words. "I know more about the war than I said I did. And I don't think that Grandfather will find us."

At least he wasn't filled with an overwhelming need to protect her; she could take care of herself.

She sat up, shrugging the stiffness out of her neck. "I thought as much."

"My grandfather lives here because it was either exile or Azkaban. My father and my grandmother were pardoned. My mother ran away rather than fight."

"My mum still has nightmares. She talks in her sleep about the smell of blood."

"Dad says that I'm already braver than he's ever been—he doesn't want me to be in a position were I have to make that sort of decision, but if I am he wants me to make the right one."

"When I was little, Mum went away for a few months. Dad would take us to visit her once a week in St Mungo's, but he didn't talk about it after the fact. I've never found out what was wrong with her."

"I don't want Al to know what my family is."

They had been having two entirely separate conversations, each of them puncturing the air with confessions, but Rose was looking at him as though she were actually seeing him, now, and chose to reply to his final comment.

"I don't think that he would care."

———

The sound of running water turned off, leaving the room suddenly, painfully silent. Helga, whom Hermione was now absolutely certain was Snape, was sitting in an armchair flipping through a newspaper. Hermione was lying on her stomach on the bedspread and using a translation spell to read the details of the document that they had stolen, although little of the information was being absorbed. Her eyes kept wandering up to the woman in the corner, as she tried to work out what, exactly, was going on.

"You're not fooling anyone," she remarked, trying her best to sound offhand. "At least, you aren't fooling me."

Helga glanced up from the newspaper and raised her eyebrow, still not speaking.

"I realise that you're supposed to be dead and all, but Lucius must think that I'm a complete idiot and you've certainly lost your touch."

Her expression was transitioning from one of smugness to one of shock. Good.

Hermione went back to reading, unsure whether the sick feeling in her stomach was guilt or anger. True, the lie had been transparent, but it had been a lie nonetheless, and one that she had helped to create.

There was a rustle of pages, and when she looked up there was a dark-haired man standing above her.

"Congratulations, Miss Granger. Twenty points to Gryffindor."

The bed was high enough that when she raised herself onto her knees she was almost at eye level, allowing her to examine him properly. Any doubt that had existed in the back of her mind was gone; his face was the same elongated structure that she remembered, although there were lines fanning out around his mouth and eyes that hadn't existed before, and streaks of grey in his hair.

These, however, weren't the most important details. Beginning slightly below his jaw and wrapping halfway around his neck was a scar, disfiguring and vulnerable.

"Haven't you noticed that I'm all grown up now?" she replied sharply, to disguise the fact that she felt anything but.

The scent of blood clogged her nostrils, forcing her to open her mouth for air, and her fingers instinctually reached for the locket around her neck.

"Although you still can't seem to keep your mouth shut when you know the answer to a question."

She heard the bathroom door open behind her, but couldn't bring herself to respond. Snape seemed to have no problem with this—he looked right past her, a lip curling up derisively.

"You told her."

"Of course I didn't." Lucius' tone was as flippant as it had sounded over lunch, when he had been mocking her. "Don't be ridiculous."

"This, from the compulsive liar. Thank you, I'm convinced." Snape seemed to be choking on his words with something more than fury. "You kept a secret for over two decades, just to accidentally let it slip over lunch?"

"I didn't let it slip." Less glibness, now, and more warning. Hermione found that she didn't want to be in the room when this exploded, as much because it seemed to be a private feud as because she didn't want to be picking bits off them off of the ceiling fan. "And considering that my lies have been protecting you, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them."

Regaining basic motor functions, she stood and retrieved her shoes and purse from under the bed. "I'm, er, going to step out for a minute," she said, but neither of them showed signs of having heard her. "Don't wait up."

As the door clicked behind her, she heard the shouting begin.

———

Flying down the stairs, she hurried through the lobby and outside, sucking in gulps of fresh air. Her lungs constricted and she doubled over, earning her a strange look from the concierge.

A part of her mind, the illogical part, was screaming at her to put as much space between her and the hotel room as possible. She had been staring at him, but seeing bloodstains on the floorboards, threads of memory winding through a corridor, the face of a desperate woman trying to save her son and husband. She felt as though she had been doused with the scent of death—no, not death. Guilt.

Rationality finally began to kick in, telling her in the soothing tones of a lullaby that she shouldn't feel surprised. The clues had been staring her in the face for twenty-five years, so it was entirely her fault that realisation hadn't dawned until a few hours ago.

And it wasn't as though anyone had _wanted _her to find out.

Her breathing finally steadying, she straightened and smoothed her skirt with trembling hands. She wished that she hadn't left the file lying on the bed of the room. Without it in hand, she felt lost, bewildered, and slightly vulnerable—there was no longer anything to drive her forward.

Instead, she found herself seeking something to do with her hands: a cigarette, only she didn't smoke, or a drink, but she was standing on the side of a street in a strange city. Anything to keep the half-mad shaking at bay.

She opted for setting off at a brisk pace, intending a brief walk to clear her head. It was perhaps not the brightest thing, given the circumstances, but infinitely better than the alternative of blind panic.

———

Well over an hour later, she pushed the door to the room open, peering tentatively inside. Whatever explosion had taken place seemed to have passed. Both men were in bathrobes, glaring at each other from opposite sides of the room. Snape glanced over the top of his newspaper, disinterested, as she slipped in and kicked her shoes into the corner. At some point when she had been gone, Lucius had acquired a glass of wine, which he was sipping at as he perused the file; he had taken over the bed and was leaning against the headboard with his legs stretched out in front of him.

Gesturing at a bottle and two glasses on the nightstand, he said, "I've ordered enough for the three of us. If Severus ever decides to stop sulking, he may join us, but until then we'll have to suffer through this abysmal excuse for champagne—with horribly inadequate glasses—alone."

Automatically her eyes sought out the other man, but he was pointedly focussed on his paper, only twitching slightly when Lucius laughed.

"I take it that you haven't had a chance to come up with some stunningly brilliant idea?" She was more than faintly annoyed at him for wasting time ordering drinks and ensuring that he was perfectly coiffed when her daughter—not to mention his grandson and Al—were in some undetermined and probably dangerous location, but found herself pouring a glass anyway.

"Not particularly. The address on this file is in a Muggle area, which means that our little terrorist is either attempting to live anonymously or using a third party to send messages to us. The former makes the situation remarkably less complex, which in turn makes it less likely. In the case of the latter, we'll be able to come out of the situation knowing more than we do now, but that doesn't mean anything."

"Because some poor Muggle sod under the Imperius Curse is going to spill secrets about his master to us if we ask nicely," Snape remarked with more than a slight bite in his tone. "Or even because we coerce. I thought your mantra was, 'Everybody lies'."

Hermione sat on the bed next to Lucius, peering over his shoulder curiously. If she had looked, the cold smile on his face might have frightened her.

"Except beaurocrats, if only because they're too dull to entertain the notion, and memories, which is where you, my friend, come in."

"No," Snape said flatly without looking up. "Absolutely not."

"Memory extraction is illegal for a reason," Hermione pointed out, although she was under no illusions as to what she was willing to do.

"So are blackmail, extortion, and kidnap, all of which form a component of my back-up plan."

"And I suppose that I'm the one who will be involved the extortion part of this?" International acclaim had it's high points, namely a large portion of the population being willing to pay for drinks; being the one expected to abuse your power in morally ambiguous situations wasn't one of them.

"All the more reason to convince Severus that he should use his considerable Legilimency skills to obtain the information that we need. Although I wouldn't worry too much if it comes down to it—memory charms were invented for situations like this. Although you've long been acquainted with them, I hear."

"They _were_ discussed briefly in third year Charms." She didn't know how he had heard about her parents' Australian holiday, and she wasn't about to take the bait, but her hands balled into fists in spite of herself. "Is there anything else that you've managed to pick out of that?"

He shook his head, squinting slightly at the page.

"Oh, for the love of God, just wear your glasses," Snape snarled, giving Hermione the impression that he had been longing to say it since the conversation had begun. "You'll give yourself lines and then I'll have to listen to the whinging about anti-wrinkle cream and how it makes your skin oily."

Lucius scowled. "I don't need glasses. My eyes are fine."

"Which is why you need lenses that are half an inch thick."

"That explains the driving, then," Hermione interjected. "I was positive that I was about to die."

Snape buried his head in his hands with a groan. "You're a bloody idiot."

Sensing another oncoming argument that she didn't want to mediate, she announced, "I'm taking a shower."

———

Severus might have been in love three times, although certainly not in the conventional sense; they defied labels and explanation, which made him uncertain about how to classify them. The word could very well be used, but it didn't begin to explain the complexity, the ambiguity, the manipulation.

The first time had been Lily Evans, but he didn't think about that any longer. He had given the memories away in what he believed to be a final act of mercy for Potter—Dumbledore's condemnation, not his vindication, had been the sole point of the exercise, but the fool hadn't managed to pick up on that—and all that remained was a fuzzy, vague notion of events. It stood, in his mind, as a reminder and a warning of obsession and all that it led to, the least of the consequences being a near-fatal snakebite.

The second, he supposed, hadn't been so much love as a love affair: brief, passionate, and simple. Until then, he had firmly doubted the existence of erotic encounters among the library stacks, so when he had begun spending time in the library of Florence's university, he had assumed that he was making a safe choice. The first day, they had sat across from on another at a table, as he read through a book on Tuscan history, painfully slowly and with the aid of a lexicon and she peered over the edge of a laptop with curiosity and interest. He thought little of it, until he returned two days later to find her there again, and for several days after. Before they had had so much as a conversation, he knew all of her quirks, like the way she tucked her hair behind her ear obsessively, or adjusted her glasses and gave him a distracted smile when she paused in the midst of typing. He even could even tell what classes she was enrolled in, if the stack of books she kept next to her was any indicator. More than once, he caught himself wondering what she perceived in him, if he had any such habits that he performed subconsciously to draw her attention.

It took nearly a month before she spoke to him, introducing herself in careful English, which told him that she had noticed the Italian-English dictionary that was his constant companion. He had been observing her so closely, that he had forgot to notice that she was Asian—the staccato accent surprised him slightly, but made sense at the same time. Both of them were foreigners, which was why they craved the familiarity of their table. It had become, in his mind, a private embassy of sorts.

Her name, she said, was Chou, and his glance at her student identification card didn't belie this. She was studying abroad for a year, and his guess about her courses was correct: History of Art and Classics. Although it had been long enough since his death that he no longer felt compelled to wear disguises constantly, he told her that his name was Alex and that he had been an ex-pat for only a year, even though he had been living there for five.

She asked him out for dinner, but not about the scar on his neck, which he took to be a good sign so he accepted, and, within two days, she had dragged him away from their table and led him up several flights of stairs until they found a deserted alcove, where she half-threw him against the wall, which went against any notion of her that he had formed. Perhaps it was the foreknowledge of impermanence or the warning shadows of memory that prevented it, but she didn't become a fixation or an idol, merely someone whom he looked forward to seeing in spite of the rather limited conversation that was a mix of English and Italian, whom he enjoyed taking out for dinner, and who had no qualms about dragging him into her flat at the end of the evening. And, maybe it was the absence of his name and his past more than the fact that she couldn't follow much of what he told her that gave him the freedom to be, for once, completely honest.

It was the closest thing to bliss that he had ever experienced and, though he had missed her after she returned to Japan, there was a sense of finality. They didn't need one another, nor did either of them consider the possibility of a future.

And, then… Then, she had left in the spring, as planned, and he was suddenly alone in a villa in Tuscany with Lucius, who was undergoing a mid-life crisis of sorts and on whom the mental strain of the last few years was starting to show.

Narcissa had visited that April, a fact that Severus had nearly missed, caught up as he was. He had dinner with them once, at which point he noticed that she looked as though she were ten years older than she ought to be, which was fifteen years older than she normally looked. Lucius didn't bring it up, and Severus wasn't about to ask, so the tersely-worded letter from Draco that arrived two months later announcing her death wasn't as surprising as it might have been, but was still unexpected.

Until this point, Lucius had taken everything in stride. Exile was perfectly fine with him, as he'd been intending to retire to Tuscany anyway. His son would, given time, forgive him. He was made for long distance relationships, as it kept his wife from noticing the infidelity.

Severus hadn't been overly concerned when Lucius started knocking back the Mai Tais at ten in the morning; hangovers at four in the afternoon were, as far has he was concerned, typical Malfoy behaviour. He even took the installation of a swimming pool in stride.

However, when Lucius displayed interest in learning the plumbing behind said swimming pool, Severus began to worry that the mass alcohol consumption was getting to him. The evening that he came home with a beaten-up thirty-year-old wreck of a Benz and called it 'vintage', Severus knew that something had seriously addled his brain. It wasn't only that the car was Muggle, or that it was so hideous that he felt the need to wear sunglasses any time he happened to see it trundling up the drive, it was that Severus didn't know what to do with a Lucius Malfoy whose eyes wandered vaguely over the dinner table, lost and uncomprehending. It terrified him, and lasted well over a year, as he looked on helplessly; at some point it occurred to him that Lucius and Narcissa were not a couple bound together by marriage—they were a unit. They had already been one by the time that he had met Lucius, and even when they weren't speaking, which was often, each knew the other's movements and thoughts instinctually.

Lucius, Severus had come to realise, needed that to merely feel balanced, never mind confident and powerful. It wasn't something only Narcissa could provide, necessarily, although she had been ideal for the job.

He spent a fair bit of time—another six months, to be precise—in his detached bungalow, staring at the main house and plotting how to pull Lucius out of this slump. But suddenly, none of it mattered because then there was the accident, and the next thing Severus knew, he had rescued a hypothermic Lucius from a sinking car and was sitting at his hospital bedside as he recovered from massive internal bleeding. The fact that he had to be hospitalised said enough.

And, at some point during the following months of physiotherapy to rehabilitate the broken femur, Severus fell in love for the third time.

Lily had isolated him, killed parts of him, really. Relieving himself of the memories had been like shedding dead skin; it was vestigial and made his conscience itchy. Chou had been the gestation period, the time for regrowth.

Lucius was completely different; he made him feel as though he was in control for the first time, as though he was the self-sufficient one, and yet completely dependent. It was both terrifying and liberating, which left him feeling paralysed, uncertain, and determined not to make the first move.

To make matters worse, Lucius took at least three times longer to heal than should have been necessary, adding guilt onto terror as he realised how much Lucius had let himself go. It was almost enough to make him not notice the way his heart pounded when he helped the other man down the stairs, and the strange anticipation he felt when he woke up in the morning accompanied by a half-hard cock and bewilderment.

Lucius, the bastard, noticed all of this and nearly negated months of rehab trying to act on it, but Severus insisted that if he wanted anything he would have to bottom, or wait until he could walk without a cane. He already felt too much responsibility for the situation.

After that, the relationship more or less stabilised. Lucius went back to being a vain prick, which meant that he was once again eating, seducing women, and exercising in equal measure. Severus went back to sulking over books in his bungalow, and submitting history papers to various Muggle academic journals.

The only difference was that now they were sleeping together.

After that, though, Lucius made a point keeping Severus apart from the women that he brought back to the villa, which was why he was so bewildered at the present situation. He didn't demand fidelity or honesty; he did, however, prefer to know Lucius' motives.

Sliding his hand up a woman's skirt when his lover was sitting next to him in the back of a taxi was rude, pointless as she had seemed oblivious, and, worst of all, unsubtle. He had been better since they arrived at the hotel, but having Granger crawl onto the bed next to him had been a bit much.

Then, of course, there was the fact that Lucius had outed him, presumably as some sort of confused ploy to lure her into bed. Of course he denied it, as had Granger, but after a lifetime friendship with the man, he was perfectly aware how little words meant. And, in spite of the fact that he had known it would have to happen eventually and that Lucius' weakness for attractive women would someday get the best of him, it hurt.

Quite a lot actually.

Although not enough to lose his head entirely.

——

Hermione's shower ended up being on the long side of things, and not only because it was relaxing. She was tired, and tired meant that she should go to bed, but the problem was that there was only one bed.

One bed for three people. Two of which were men.

She couldn't help it, really; as soon as that thought had surfaced, ones that involved being sandwiched between the two of them had followed it, and none of them involved sleep. Which made her feel both guilty and excited at once.

Her daughter was missing, and all she could think about was the possibility of a threesome.

When she ran out of hot water, it occurred to her that it might be time to dry off and deal with whatever the night would bring. She paused on the bathmat to wring out her hair and wondered if she should put her clothes back on or follow the example of the bathrobe, which was, in retrospect, slightly suggestive. Still, there was no way that she was going to sleep in her clothes, and the soft fluffy material was beckoning her on.

In the end, she charmed the clothes clean and put on her underwear on under the robe, wrapping her shirt and blouse into a small ball.

Ironing charms had been invented for a reason.

In the main room, Snape was still sitting in his corner—on the same page of the bloody newspaper, as far as she could tell—but Lucius had mysteriously disappeared.

"He's stepped out for a fag," he said without otherwise acknowledging her.

Privately, she thought that cigarettes made by Hugo Boss didn't count as 'fags', but opted for the snide remark, "What, in his bathrobe?" instead.

Snape set down the paper reluctantly, meeting her eyes. "He's a Malfoy. They do as they please."

"I've noticed," she snorted. "I'm tempted to think that he doesn't care about his grandson; he's been treating this as a prolonged wine-tasting."

Disinterest shifted to curiosity, and she subtly tried Legilimency, to no avail. "Don't make that mistake—he does care, but is too arrogant to think that anything truly horrible could happen."

"Long-term memory loss?" she asked.

"The war was two and a half decades ago," Snape pointed out, "and many things have happened in between. Some people forget more quickly than others."

_And some people never forget,_ she added mentally. It seemed that the in-between period had been dictated by the war, her response to it, her inability to move on. Some days, she still felt the old panic rise up and found herself reaching for her wand automatically. "Old habits die hard," she said, as much herself as to him.

She suddenly found him at eye level, and realised with a jolt that he wasn't much taller than her. "Why are you protecting him?"

"I'm… not sure what you mean." She would have backed away from the wild look in his eyes, but was afraid it would be misinterpreted. Slow movements. She was tempted to hold her hand out to him to sniff, as she would a stray that was eyeing her warily.

"You're lying for him. Why?"

That made things more clear. "For you," she replied. "I thought that he had buried you and I thought that you deserved a proper burial. Common decency, really."

He seemed to be grinding his teeth in frustration, which only confused Hermione further. "Right now, I mean," he said with carefully controlled patience. "He obviously told you that I was still alive."

Her hand itched to touch the locket around her neck and ensure that it was still there, but she controlled the urge. "No, he didn't. I even asked him about what happened after the Shrieking Shack and he wouldn't tell me. I saw the two of you walking on the grounds of the villa before you were in disguise and, well, Helga _was_ thoroughly unconvincing."

His mouth twisted wryly, telling her that he didn't quite believe her, but was willing to accept the explanation. Briefly, she contemplated undoing the locket from around her neck and giving him the memories, but she had had them so long that they were practically hers now. She probably knew them better than he did. Instead, she took a careful step towards him.

"I'm glad that you survived," she said quietly. "Watching Nagini bite you…"

"I am too," he remarked dryly. "The last half of my life has been a significant improvement over the first, for the most part."

"Always a bonus to maintaining major organ function."

"Indeed."

He had stepped forward too, and it was something of a miracle that they weren't touching. She slipped her hand around his wrist gently, as though ensuring that he was actual flesh and blood, and drew him closer until their fronts pressed up against each other, fitting comfortably.

It briefly occurred to her that she should thank him for making the outcome of the war possible, but words, for the moment, held no meaning, so she kissed him instead. It was more friendly than passionate, meant to be little more than a quick peck, but his teeth nipped at her bottom lip before she could pull away and before she knew what was happening, her tongue was shoving itself violently into his mouth as her stomach relocated to her right ankle.

She would have been content to let it go on, but a voice from the doorway interrupted them. "Severus," Lucius remarked pleasantly as they froze, mouths still plastered against one another's. "I'm so pleased that you finally caught on. I had thought that I was being rather obvious."

Severus ignored the remark, clutching Hermione to him more closely, which she took to mean that Lucius _had_ been suggesting a threesome all evening; the second figure that was suddenly paying particular attention to the back of her neck confirmed it. Shifting her still-damp hair out of the way, he worked his way down her neck until he found the place between her shoulder blades that made her squirm and ran his tongue along it experimentally.

"That is," he added, "if it agreeable to you of course."

She couldn't help it; all but falling back against him, she moaned and tried to nod emphatically without bashing her teeth against Severus'. She very nearly succeeded.

And, then, Lucius was gone and Severus' hand was against the small of her back, guiding towards the bed where the covers were being pulled back. Completely unabashed, Lucius untied his robe and tossed it into the corner, flopping back onto the bed and propping himself up on his elbows.

Men over sixty, Hermione decided, even if they happened to be wizards, simply weren't allowed to look that good. She'd have to introduce some sort of international covenant when she returned to work that forbid it. But, she supposed, if she did that, then this wouldn't be happening.

"Were you planning on unwrapping our package, Severus?" Lucius drawled, and she suddenly felt self-conscious. True, she wasn't old enough to worry about wrinkles in awkward places, but she doubted that she had ever looked as gleaming and perfect as he looked right now.

Without replying, Severus spun her around and fingered the collar of the dressing gown, running his other hand along the part where one side folded over the other until he was able to slide it between her legs.

Tugging at the cloth that he found there, he commented, "Worried about being indecent?"

"Just making life harder for you," she shot back, mentally cursing herself for that poor, misguided decision as she firmly resolved to never wear knickers again.

Rather than being amused, his eyes went glassy and she could almost hear Lucius' smirk from the bed that she was increasingly tempted to throw herself onto.

"If you don't hurry, I'm going to feel obliged to help you." There was that sleepy, languid tone again that sent a shiver down her spine and back up again. "And you _know_ how I despise more work."

Severus tugged at the tie holding the robe together, and it fell open. She let it slide off of her shoulders and to the floor, feeling all the more exposed next to Severus, who was still clothed. As he reached around behind her to undo the bra clasp, she pulled open his robe as well and dragged her fingernails lightly across his chest. The offending knickers were off a second later, tossed into another corner, but she barely noticed because now hands—there were too many for them to just belong to Severus—were tracing the outline of her ribcage, her hips, her legs, and her knees were buckling and they were sitting her against the headboard…

And then, as though in silent agreement, they drew back in order to scrutinise her from the foot of the bed. She stared back helplessly, unsure of what was expected.

It was strange, being the object of so much blatant attention; it made her feel young and inexperienced and exposed, which was silly if she thought too hard about it, but rational thought was well on its way out the door and working its way to the local pub for a pint or two. Besides, as far as she knew, this was a regular occurrence for the two of them, and she didn't want to consider with whom she was being compared. Instinctually, she made a movement to hug her knees to her chest, but Lucius caught her by the ankles, straightening her legs and spreading them slightly.

"I don't play hide-and-go-seek," he chided, bending into the space he had created. "You can save that for when Severus has his turn."

She would have liked to watch what he was doing, but when her vision began to blacken at the edges, she decided it might be wiser to close her eyes. Her hands began to twist knobs into the fitted sheet and she threw her head back with a sob, barely noticing as her skull connected solidly with the headboard.

And this, the voice of reason reminded her, was only the warm-up.

She was pleased that it had finally decided to be sensible.

At some point in the period of time that followed, Severus took over for Lucius, who moved to cushion her head with his hand. It was seamless enough that she didn't notice when or how the switch occurred, only that she was no longer blacking out and could pry her eyes open enough to see why.

"You've stopped hiding." She hated him for been so cool and disaffected. Really and deeply hated.

"And you've… oh, _fuck_."

Severus, who had paused to eye them suspiciously, made a bid for attention that she couldn't ignore, before raising himself up to a crouch. There was a faint chuckle in her left ear as she leaned forward and tangled her hands in his hair, pulling him back with her. They missed the headboard by a fraction of an inch, and Hermione found the crushing weight strangely comforting and familiar. Lucius was still next to them in the bed, but she was no longer being overwhelmed from both sides. Relieved, she took the opportunity to regain her bearings, knowing it would be temporary.

She _hoped _it would be temporary.

It was the first opportunity that she had had to properly explore him, and her fingers etched out the slight groves formed by his ribs and pushed gently back on his pelvic bone, shifting torso slightly up the bed to give him a better angle. A quick glance at Lucius told her that he approved; he was lounging against the headboard, surveying them impassively.

It would have been enough to be insulting, but the hooded, sleepy look of his eyes and the way that they darted with the movement of her hands gave him away, so she allowed him his game. She would have time to end it later.

A curtain of dark hair fell around her face, obscuring him from view, and suddenly she didn't care whether or not he was bored because Severus was sliding into her, forcing the world into a surreal clarity composed of brief images that recreated themselves onto her eyelids when she blinked.

Pieces of hair brushing against her forehead, the way his head bent so that the scar on his throat was almost obscured and his eyes focussed on some point beyond her. His breath tickled her cheek, making her increasingly aware of her own and she clawed frantically at his back as air caught between her mouth and lungs.

Hands steered her so that she was lying on her side, facing Severus, their legs entangled, and threads of blond hair tumbled over her shoulders as everything seemed to be pressed out of her, exploding upwards and being replaced with something that was new and terrifying.

That something twisted inside her abdomen, causing her legs to quake, her voice to vanish into a frantic whisper, and she clung to the feeling even after it had dulled to a half-response, an echo lost somewhere in her thighs.


	4. Chapter 3

**Part Three**

When she awoke, it was to an empty bed and a half-dark room. Sleep hadn't lasted long, but she felt well rested for a change, relaxed and alert. About to push back the covers and hunt for her discarded clothing, she was startled by a figure sitting in the chair.

"Good morning."

"Does it count as morning if the sun isn't up yet?" She stalled for time; prancing around naked in front of Severus Snape was all very well, but only if he was naked too.

"I'm sorry if I woke you." His apology did sound genuine, albeit slightly impassive. It seemed that he was as uncertain as she.

"Not at all," she said, slightly hesitant. "I just… don't do this sort of thing often—"

"If you're looking for some sort of reassurance, wait for Lucius to return, because I don't either," he cut in briskly.

"Actually, I was wondering if there was a dignified way to retrieve my clothing, or if I should just bolt for the place that I think it all landed." She trained her eyes on his, wondering how he would react and wanting to uncover the reason for his obvious discomfort. He certainly hadn't been experiencing any last night.

"Oh. Ah, er…"

Smirking, she accepted the wand he thrust at her and forced herself to repress a giggle as he hastily retreated to the toilet.

———

"Do you think we should try to wake him up somehow?"

"Not so loud. Al's still asleep. And how?"

"I don't know, but it's been almost a day. We should at least try to make sure that nothing's wrong with him."

"Which would be absolutely brilliant, except that neither of us has a wand. And I thought I told you to be quieter."

For a moment, Al forgot where he was. It was easy to convince himself that this was normal, except that Rose and Scorpius rarely spoke to one another, except to bicker, and he couldn't come up with a decent reason for sleeping on a stone floor.

"'Sokay. I'm already awake," he mumbled, pulling himself upright and trying to swallow away his morning breath.

"They've given us toothbrushes and a toilet appeared overnight," Scorpius told him, moving from the corner where he had been crouching next to Rose. There's no privacy, but it could be worse."

Scorpius was eyeing him nervously, Al realised, although he wasn't sure what that meant.

"We could try wandless magic," Rose was saying, oblivious to everything but the problem in front of her. "Obviously I've never done it, but I know enough of the theory behind it and between the three of us there should be enough power to be effective."

"We're trying to wake up Rosie's Italian paramour," Scorpius said in a sotto voice, rolling his eyes. "The more people that are conscious, the more hysterical fun we can all enjoy together."

"At least we'll know that he's all right." Rose bit her lip doubtfully.

Al looked back and forth between them, unfazed. This was practically camaraderie.

"Not to mention that explaining this to him will be a stroll through the park on a sunny morning in July, as none of us speak Italian."

"You do," Al pointed out without thinking, then waited for the explosion. Scorpius merely looked annoyed.

"I know how to order a meal, ask for directions, and read Petrarch. Grandfather insisted that they were the only skills I would ever need."

"For analysing mediaeval literature, maybe," Rose snorted. "Your grandfather sounds like an idiot."

Wrinkling his nose, Scorpius replied, "I think that he would have suggested using it to seduce women if Dad hadn't forced him to swear a blood oath not to tell me about that sort of thing until I was older."

"Fortunately, I'm immune to men who quote poetry, so I'm not about to forget about the important things the moment you start displaying your knowledge of Italian to Marco _once we wake him up._"

Rose was calm, Al noticed. Far calmer than she had been before. Somehow, this made her seem more furious than he had ever seen her; it was, quite frankly, disturbing.

Scorpius seemed to have regained his sense of self-preservation, and was nodding along, which made Rose's expression look more like of a sixteen-year-old girl and less like that of a serial killer.

"Wonderful. I suppose that we'll have to teach ourselves wandless magic, then?"

———

"I've brought espresso!"

Hermione jerked in shock, nearly falling out of the chair; she hadn't meant to fall asleep, especially not in that position. Lucius was looming over her with paper cups stacked on one another, obviously hoping to catch her off guard.

"Give it all to Granger," Snape suggested, who had returned to the room at some point during her nap. "She hasn't learnt to keep up with you yet."

If he had sounded uncomfortable before, he was downright bristly now.

"No, thank you," she said, making a face. "I hate espresso."

"It's for my sake, not yours," he replied, thrusting one at her. "Drink up—it will make you feel better."

"And mixing white and red wine doesn't make me drunk any faster?" She accepted it in spite of her misgivings, tossing it back in one gulp.

Lucius chuckled as she choked and espresso spewed from her nose. "Idiot," he said, passing Severus his drink and taking the lid off his own, "it's not tequila. You _sip _it."

Recovering, she eyed his drink suspiciously. "Why does yours have whipping cream?"

"Do you mean," he said, looking affronted, "that you've never heard of Espresso con panna?"

"And, yet, he doesn't look a day over forty-five," Snape cut in acerbically. "One day your suicidal tendencies will catch up with you."

Lucius smirked. "I wouldn't worry about that; my vanity simply won't allow for it. Now, I suggest that we find our little friend and fetch the children before Hermione's head explodes."

Her eyes narrowed as she stood and cast a charm to smooth out the wrinkles on her clothing. "The temptation to strangle you wouldn't be as strong if you had been kind enough to bring me a cup of tea instead of something that tastes like burnt toast in a cup." She momentarily forgot her new wand's tendency to overshoot, and the skirt stretched out rigidly around her knees.

"Too much starch?" Lucius made a noise that could have been a snigger, if that hadn't been too undignified.

Hermione eyed her wand and the blond mane simultaneously. "If you aren't quiet, I'll flat-iron your hair for you."

He stepped away instinctively. "I think that you have already wreaked more than enough damage on my hair."

Snape's expression as he rolled off the bed was one of grudging amusement, and, although she didn't want to think too hard about why, she took it as a victory.

———

The trouble with Granger, Severus decided as they knocked on the door of the townhouse, was that he _liked _her. And it was easier to be annoyed at her than at Lucius, who knew the game and knew exactly how to force him into a situation where he would concede defeat.

Granger just flat out refused to play, and had spent the taxi ride across the city trying to make friends, which only increased his irritation.

Easier to be annoyed at Granger, perhaps, but easier to blame Lucius.

The door swung open, revealing a young, dark-haired woman who was clutching a dressing gown closed around her throat. Lucius glanced at him expectantly, and, with a sigh, he began to spout out questions in fluent Italian.

Managing the man's name—Vincenzo Castelnuovo—was nearly a paragraph in itself.

After a moment of bartering, which may or may not have contained veiled threats, the woman opened the door the rest of the way and allowed them into the entrance, disappearing around a corner.

"Should we follow her?" Granger peered down the dingy corridor and wrinkled at the overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke.

"She wants us to wait. And don't look so surprised—I've only lived here for a quarter of a century."

The last part of the sentence was directed at Lucius, who staunchly refused to learn anything more complex than a wine vintage; English, French, and Arabic, he claimed, were all the languages he needed. The rest could be solved with translation spells.

"Why would I need to learn the language when I have you?"

A man rounded the corner before Severus could send a proper glare his way.

———

"And you don't remember being in the Trastevere quarter yesterday?" Hermione asked, for what felt like the twentieth time in an hour. She didn't need Snape's translation for the emphatically—and defensively—negative answer.

Lucius broke his silence, finally, and cut in. "Could you be any more stereotypically law-abiding? Even if he does remember, he certainly isn't going to tell us the truth."

"Why don't you see if you can do better, then?" she shot back, contemplating the many crimes that she would commit for a vial of Veritaserum.

"With pleasure." To Snape, he said, "Ask our friend to fetch the shoes he was wearing yesterday."

A moment later, the man pointed to a ratty pair of brown loafers behind the door that Lucius lifted and held at a difference, all but holding his nose. He drew his wand and tapped the soles of the shoes twice. From her position a few feet away, Hermione saw something spidery and map-like etch across them.

"Just as I thought," he said. "Severus, if you would be so kind as to put these on and leave this gentleman your shoes…"

"_Excuse _me?"

"Well, he can't very well wear Hermione's and mine are worth more than his life, so we haven't any other options."

A mutinous glare spread briefly across his face before he kicked his shoes off and accepted the pair that Lucius was holding as far away from his robes as possible. "Oh, wait, I know this bit—just follow the yellow brick road. Are we off to see the wizard?"

"You make a poor cardboard cut-out of Judy Garland," Lucius said, levelling his wand at the couple and Stunning them in a single, smooth movement, "so kindly cease to insult her memory. Hermione, am I mistaken in assuming that you know how to remove memory charms?"

She shook her head, swallowing hard and watching as the colour dropped out of Snape's face.

"I thought that you said…"

Lucius, apparently, saw it too, because the arrogance dropped out of his face briefly. "It's necessary."

"Would you mind…" Her mouth had suddenly gone dry, and the words stuck to her tongue. "Would you mind leaving the room? It's delicate work without any distractions."

They obeyed and she flicked on a light, advancing on the woman first. She had only done this a handful of times: to her parents, and on some particularly difficult cases. It was far from simple at the best of times, which did not, in her opinion, include a wand that tended toward the overly vigorous, two unwilling subjects, and the noise of traffic in the background.

The back of her mind was hoping that the spell would just refuse to work—it was better than most of the alternatives. From her early days in the Ministry, she remembered tales of interrogations gone awry and a wing in St Mungo's devoted to 'victims of justice', as the other departments liked to call them. As a part of her training, she had been forced to visit it on several occasions, as though she hadn't spent her entire sixth year flipping through textbooks that highlighted the psychological effects of tampering with memories.

The Department of Magical Law Enforcement was fond of emphasising consequences.

They didn't have to be—she already knew that she had increased her parents' likelihood of Alzheimer's by at least twenty percent.

Still, Rose had been missing for at least fifteen hours, which was fifteen hours too long, and she wasn't willing to wait for the blackmail to begin. There were choices, but she didn't like them.

With a trembling hand, she pressed the tip of the wand to the woman's forehead and allowed her mind to flow through it and into her consciousness. It wasn't quite Legilimency, because she didn't care about the memories themselves. She cared about the cracks, the flaws, anything that didn't flow. Thoughts weren't necessarily sequential, but gaps, she had learned, shouldn't exist.

If the person who invented the memory had been careful, it could take days to locate a loose end. When she had invented memories for her parents, she had spent months designing a seamless flow of events, then ensured that she left the slightest snags in the fabric—two hours at King's Cross on the day that she left for Hogwarts, although the fictional friend from Edinburgh that they were seeing off was gone within a third of that, dinners that her parents hated but she loved, a child's rocking chair in the cellar.

Things that an intruder wouldn't think to look for. Those were the discontinuities that mattered.

As she had hoped, it didn't take long to find the first one. Three meals were served to a dinner table that only seated two, and there was no source of light in the room, only an anonymous glow that resembled candlelight.

From there, it was simple. Logic demanded that, confused and poorly trained servers aside, it hadn't happened; as though she had tugged on the wrong thread on a jumper, the implanted memory unravelled, revealing a bald, oddly blank-faced man who was sitting with them. She examined him more closely, but the blur around him seemed to be a part of the memory rather than a construction obscuring it.

Now, she pulled at the memory itself, dislodging it and drawing it out through her wand.

"I need a container," she called as she cupped the silvery substance in her hand.

There was a scraping of chairs and some muffled insults before Lucius strolled around the corner, Tupperware in hand.

"Not quite a multi-million Galleon Pensieve," he remarked, holding it out, "but I suppose that it will have to do. Have you found anything of interest?"

She deposited the memory in the bottom of it, tightening her lips into a terse smile. "Perhaps. The memory charms aren't overly complex, as far as I can tell, and that particular memory could tell us whom we're up against—but I don't know how we'll find him."

"And him?"

"Haven't looked yet, but I suspect he will be trickier."

Setting down the container, he replied, "I'll see if Severus has found any more of these plastic monstrosities. We ought to keep the two of them separate."

She nodded, then backed against the wall to lean on it until he returned. Exchanging a brief look, she turned away and set to work on the man.

It took barely longer than a second in his mind to realise that something was wrong.

———

"You're not trying."

"Because there's hardly a point."

"You don't know that!"

"Even if any of us could _do _wandless magic, which we can't, there are probably dampening spells placed everywhere. We're in a stone room without doors or windows—whoever put us here isn't a complete idiot."

"Well, what do you suggest that we do?" Rose lowered her voice, aware that it had risen to a shriek. Al was eyeing both of them and looking annoyed, which was hardly surprising.

"Sleep," Scorpius suggested. "Try to make pillows with grey blankets devoid of anything but the thinnest fibres. Play 'Truth or Consequences'. Anything but this."

"I'll take you up on the last one," Al remarked. "Sorry, Rose, but I really don't think this is working."

She shrugged, recognising her cousin's attempt at pacification for what it was. "I suppose."

"Excellent," Scorpius said, turning with a mock menacing grin to Al. "So tell me, because I've been aching to know…"

———

It wasn't simply that the memories were fraudulent, although she could sense that almost immediately. It was the strangely grey, woolly texture of his mind; she had to push away the mist in order to reach the memories.

She drew herself out of his mind, and lowered the wand. "He's under the Imperius Curse," she called into the kitchen. "I can't find the memories properly because of it."

It was Snape who came around the corner this time. "End the spell?"

"It would be like sending up a flare to let anyone interested know that we've come this far. He's Muggle—he's not going to shake it off on his own."

Snape examined the man before them closely, and Hermione watched him. A muscle jumped in his cheek, and he said, "I'll try it. I should have from the beginning—I don't know what Lucius was thinking."

She had words to say to that—sharp ones—but was clever enough to recognise that the sharpness in his voice wasn't directed at her.

Leaving him to the task, she wandered over to where she assumed that the kitchen was and joined Lucius in a tense silence.

After a moment, she began, "You don't think that…"

"They're fine. They have to be, to be effective hostages."

"Right."

She sat across from him at the table, drumming her fingernails on any surface that they could find: lap, chair, leg. It broke up the increasingly dire direction that her thoughts were moving in, relieving the tension from her shoulders, which had apparently bunched around her ears at some point over the course of the morning.

"No matter how hard you try, that table isn't going to turn into a piano without aid of a wand," he remarked, after ten minutes had passed in silence. "Which is for the best, really, because no amount of directionless pounding is going to result in a concerto."

"I live in hope," said Hermione, but she clasped her hands together on her lap anyway, her left hand catching the right in a bone-crushing grip. Her knuckles went white. "Is it supposed to take this long?"

Amusement flickered across his otherwise drawn face. "My dear, you took at least an hour."

"Oh." Not certain how to respond, she allowed her hands to return to their previous activity. He merely raised an eyebrow, withholding the acid remark that she was certain hovered on his tongue.

Eventually, it ceased to distract her, and she began to crave conversation, background noise, anything to fill the vacuum of the kitchen. After a moment of consideration, there only appeared to be one route to take.

"I don't think he likes me much."

Lucius jumped slightly, as much surprised by the sound of her voice as she was. It seemed suddenly alien and wasn't the tone that she identified as hers.

"Severus? I wouldn't worry—it's only personal when he does like you."

They lapsed back into awkward silence, which Hermione eventually punctuated with another question. "Why was Scorpius with you? I was under the impression that you and Mal—Draco didn't speak."

He sighed heavily, to make it clear that he preferred her silence, suddenly looking as though his age had caught up with him. It occurred to her that this was the first time that she had seen him in natural light when completely sober; it displayed the fine lines that had developed around his eyes and mouth—she couldn't help but wonder if he used cosmetic spells to lessen them.

"We don't, although we occasionally communicate. Narcissa drew up the visiting arrangements before her death; she wanted to keep Draco from isolating me." A short bark of laughter told her what she needed to know on the subject.

To her surprise, he continued, almost mockingly. "She didn't need to bother, at any rate. I had Severus."

———

When Lucius had retrieved Severus from the floor of the Shrieking Shack, he had been, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Except for the fact that he was still breathing, that he had the faintest of pulses, and that the wound on his neck had already clotted. Idiot children.

Of course, it didn't say much for Severus, who hadn't bothered to brew an antidote for an attack that everyone had seen coming. Snakes didn't exist to increase the evil factor of their masters; they had to be functional to be effective.

Malfoy Manor still had its secrets, including an entire wing, and they hid him there until he was well enough to travel, at which point he followed Lucius to Italy. Life debts don't bother themselves with whether one wants to live or not, and people presumed dead aren't generally searched at border crossings.

Things looked to be resolving themselves nicely, until Severus brought up the comparatively minor issue of his Unbreakable Vow with Narcissa. He had always had a nasty habit of overcomplicating things.

Lucius enjoyed retelling this part of the story, the part before Narcissa's death. It had been an extended vacation, with a companion as clever as he and less of a shoe fixation. And, Severus didn't mind the women that he brought home. After dinner, he would retire to what Lucius liked to refer to as his converted garden shed—Severus insisted on calling it a cottage—and Lucius would provide the woman with a detailed tour of the villa that ended with the bedroom.

This was the part where Severus only remained because he believed that Lucius owed him, while Lucius was equally convinced of the reverse. Perhaps it wasn't a complete explanation, but it worked.

Besides, he _enjoyed _squabbling with Severus.

The parts that he edited out, he had long decided, were those that placed him at a disadvantage. Hermione already knew about Narcissa's death. She didn't need the intricate details of his self-destructive patterns, the accident, or the nature of his relationship with Severus. It was enough to say that Severus was Narcissa's obvious successor, and that seducing him had been a challenge well worth the risk. It was a lie that he was almost able to believe.

Hermione's arched eyebrows, however, told him that she had read between the lines and filled in the gaps left by his omissions.

"So, he's jealous," she said once he had finished. "I'm not particularly surprised."

"Of course you aren't," Lucius replied, leaning back and smirking. "Severus wears his heart on his sleeve—it's his most glaring fault."

"In spite of which fact, he has managed to locate the source of the Imperius Curse and modify the map on the soles of his shoes so that we can be led straight to it." Severus' voice cut through their conversation from the doorway, startling Lucius. No amount of time would allow him to become accustomed to the other man's silent movements.

"And the memories?" Hermione stood and paced toward him. Eyes widening, he stepped back.

"Extracting them would have caused him to run mad. I've modified their memories to prevent any trauma from our invasion of their minds, so I suggest that we leave before the Stunning Spell wears off."

A moment passed between the two of them that Lucius observed with interest. Hermione's expression shifted from compassion to approval, as Severus dropped his defensive stance and allowed his eyes to widen slightly.

As he had quite obviously not felt any guilt about the situation that he had placed Severus in, it did not alleviate his state of mind in the slightest. With this thought firmly in place, he was willing to concede that if he had, it would have.

———

"I knew most of that already."

"I thought that you said you didn't know anything about the war."

"I don't." Al paused, chewing on his lower lip. "Except for that. Dad thought it was something that I should know. He doesn't like me being in Slytherin, and he nearly lost it when he found out that I was friends with you."

"Of course he didn't," Scorpius said blandly—_too _blandly, Rose thought. "Father didn't like it either. But he didn't tell me horror stories about your dad."

"Of course he didn't." Rose shifted from her cross-legged position so that her feet stretched out in front of her. "People on the losing side always have to make concessions, even if they happen to be in the right. He didn't go to Azkaban, but they still have to punish him."

Scorpius flushed, and Al sent her an angry glare. "That's not right," her cousin said.

"Of course it isn't," she replied. "But it's what happened. Our dads, my mum… Mum not as much, but I think that she's convinced she can teach the world to share her morals, so it's the same thing, really."

Scorpius continued to eye her suspiciously. "You don't know anymore about the war than we do."

"No, but Mum made sure that I learnt Muggle history along with everything else, and people are the same everywhere. You don't help the losing side; you weaken them."

———

They ate lunch within sight of the Vatican, which meant that Lucius felt obliged to recite the history of the Catholic Church; Severus contemplated the irony that of the three of them he was the person least qualified to recite Muggle history, and Granger, judging by her smirk, was clearly having similar thoughts.

Of course, his knowledge on the subject of—mostly fictitious—mediaeval popish orgies _was _phenomenal, and he was clearly enjoying the expression on Granger's face as it shifted from annoyed to amused to scandalised—the final story that he told was certainly more graphic than necessary. She wasn't any less tense, Severus noted, in spite of the fact that she had consumed twice the amount of wine that he had and that she seemed to be making a conscious effort to appear relaxed. He might have fallen for it, if her shoulders didn't rise up around her neck when she thought that no one was looking.

"I don't think that I'll be able to finish my meal after that," she remarked to Lucius, laughing and prodding her plate of linguine. "It was a bit much for my digestive tract."

"He gets carried away when he thinks that no one can understand him." Severus raised his glass to his lips.

"Well, they can't."

"Except, of course, for the American tourists to your left, who, I think you will find, have been listening with rapt attention." He gestured to the side, at the parents staring at their table in horror and revulsion.

"At any rate, their fifteen-year-old son enjoyed it." Lucius shrugged, apparently unconcerned with the corruption of young minds. "It's nothing that I didn't tell Scorpius when he was eight."

"On that subject," Hermione said, sending both men a pointed look, "now that we have—what was it—'provided our feeble bodies with nourishment', we really ought to be going."

Severus nodded in agreement, but Lucius didn't seem nearly as anxious as he left the table and retreated to the toilets.

The moment he was out of earshot, she spun to him, eyes sharp. "What the _hell _is wrong with him?"

Severus, too, was rethinking his assumption that it was mere arrogance holding Lucius back. "I… don't know."

"It's as though he couldn't care less."

"But he does," Severus pointed out. The number of times that he had stepped out for a cigarette in the last twenty-four hours had at least tripled, which was something that only happened when he was working on a particularly illegal business deal or before he opened a letter from Draco.

"Of course he does," she said impatiently. "But as long as he's acting as though someone's shoved his head up his arse and is wandering around in the dark, it doesn't mean anything."

He sighed, opening his mouth to interject, but she continued before he could speak.

"Last night, he at least had half a reason. We needed rest to function—not that we got much anyway, but it was nice thought—but now it's pointless things. He spent half an hour debating vintages with the head waiter, which is hardly the sort of thing that makes it into the top ten on my list of priorities on a _normal _day…"

"Proof that you don't know Lucius well."

"…It's a hypothetical list, of course, but you know what I mean. Anyway, I wanted to ask you how you were planning on following the tracking spell."

"Apparition," he said with a shrug. "This distance is too great to do it in one go, but it's the most simple."

"And if we're being tracked?"

"If we are, then I don't think that the person tracking us has any doubts about where we are and what we're doing. Especially after that display this morning."

"Don't you think that a Portkey would be better? We could all create it, for one, so we would be less drained as a result…"

"If we bring in the idea of a Portkey," Severus said, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly, "then Lucius will insist on driving. If I heavily recommend that we Apparate, he'll feel that a Portkey is our best hope.

"I assume that we'll use the shoe then, considering it has a map of where we need to go on it."

He nodded. "The only problem with it is that we'll have to take a detour back to the villa—I refuse to dive headlong into dangers untold and hardships unnumbered with only one shoe."

She sat in silence for a moment, clenching her teeth hard enough that her jaw line was accentuated, before bursting out, "You could have mentioned that you were jealous."

Taken aback, he blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"If you were worried about me stealing Lucius—the thought hadn't crossed my mind. It would have been nice to know why you were being such a bastard."

"I wasn't worried." Which was the truth. He had been annoyed, insulted even, but not worried. He knew Lucius well enough for that.

"But you were jealous."

The bill arrived, and Severus noticed Lucius winding his way back with something like relief.

"Yes, Granger, I was."

"You could at least call me Hermione. I think sleeping together warrants that, even if three of us were involved. Besides, you don't even know that it's my last name still."

"Yes, I do. Unlike Lucius, I still follow the _Daily Prophet_. You didn't change your name when you married the Weasley brat, which saved you a great deal trouble after the divorce. Hermione."

Ignoring the first part of his speech, she smiled in triumph. "Thank you, Severus. I'm so pleased that we can agree."

———

With a pop, three figures appeared at the end of the drive leading up to the villa.

"Severus, it pains me to know that you are the one behind this delay," Lucius said, beginning the trek.

"As opposed to all the stalling that you've been doing," Hermione muttered, following him.

"Given the state that the shoes are in, I can't see much difference between wearing them or not," he continued. "And, Hermione, kindly cease considering me to be a whetstone for your tongue."

"I'm willing to place forty Galleons on there being mud wherever we end up," Severus cut in, "so shoes are non-negotiable. Not to mention that I think my arches are collapsing."

"He's really rather spoilt," Lucius confided to Hermione, and she gave a distracted smile in response. Her mind had already jumped ahead to solving the problem of the Portkey.

They continued the walk in silence, Hermione hurrying on ahead, as though they would be compelled to pick up the pace, which seemed to work; Lucius matched her stride-for-stride, and Severus insisted on staying half a step ahead. She was caught up enough in her thoughts that the man striding towards them from the main house didn't register until she heard Lucius' murmured curse.

"Father, what have you done with Scorpius?" Draco had the drive blocked off within seconds, wand in one hand and crumpled bit of parchment in the other.

"So kind of you to finally visit," Lucius remarked, politely distant enough to be chilling. "It's been at least a decade, hasn't it?"

"If you're holding him ransom…"

He _was_ losing his hair, Hermione mused silently, although not as much as Harry liked to insist.

"I nearly had to duel you in order to be allowed to see him," Lucius said in a soft voice that sent chills down her spine. "What makes you think that I would destroy any chance of being able to see him again?"

"Because you're a controlling prick who managed to keep me on a leash when you were in bloody Azkaban," his son snarled. "Because you tried to interfere with my wedding, even though I intentionally held it in the Manor so that you couldn't attend—"

"Perhaps that's why. And, your mother warned me about—"

"Leave Mother out of this. Every disaster that we had to crawl out of is your—"

"Enough," Severus cut in, recognising the same red splotches on the two men's cheeks that Hermione did as fury about to erupt into violence. "Your father has had nothing to do with the kidnapping. The young Miss Weasley and Potter's brat have gone missing as well."

It was his firmest teaching voice, and both Hermione and Draco shrunk back habitually at the sound of it. Draco recovered quickly, though, and rounded on the dark-haired man.

"Your taste in friends hasn't improved much, I see." There was a faint sneer to the way that he said 'friends', but Severus brushed it off.

"And you certainly haven't used the hair-replenishing potion that I sent you for Christmas."

"Only because I'm not nearly as vain as _he _is." He looked past the two men, seeing Hermione for the first time. "God, Granger, don't tell me that you've been dragged into this mess as well."

"Your son isn't the only one missing," she replied tersely.

"I meant my father's mess," he said stonily.

"It's really none of your business if I have. I think I can look after myself."

"Famous last words, Granger."

"If you don't mind terribly, we have a Portkey to create and shoes to retrieve, so I suggest that we continue this battle of words inside, with a cup of tea," Lucius suggested, worryingly cheerful.

Still, it was the most sensible thing that anyone had said for quite some time, so Hermione let herself be ushered onward, grateful to the knowledge that nobody could make tea like a decent house-elf.

———

"So now that we've all shown ourselves to have the intellectual capacity of thirteen-year-old girls at a sleepover, I really think that we should try some more wandless magic."

The two boys stared at her resentfully.

"That was something of a sexist remark," Scorpius pointed out, which meant that he was running out of ways to annoy her.

"Don't be ridiculous; I know what boys do at slumber parties," Rose said primly.

"And that is?"

"Sit in a circle and wank."

Al, who was finishing off the food that had been provided for them, nearly choked. Scorpius smirked.

"Anyway, if you two aren't going to help, at least be quiet long enough for me to give it a decent go."

"What makes you think that happens?" Al burst out belatedly, the flush in his face beginning to die down.

She sent him a withering look. "Do you really think that the girls _don't _sneak up to the boys' dormitories to spy on them? Honestly, you may be in Slytherin but you're incredibly naïve."

"We scheme to keep him that way," Scorpius told her. "It warms our dungeon-frozen hearts to see such innocence left in the world."

"I'm not naïve," Al insisted, thus negating the statement.

"And you're not distracting me anymore," Rose said. "I'm going to try to wake Marco up again. Help is welcome; distractions are not."

"You really think that you can do this, then?" Scorpius asked, rising to the bait.

"No," she replied bluntly. "But it's something to do that doesn't feel frivolous."

"I suppose there is that," Scorpius conceded. "Your annoying logic seems to be winning me over. Either that, or the boredom is." He slid a glance at Al out of the corner of his eye. "What do you think?"

"If you force me to play one more round of Truth or Consequences, I'm going to saw my bloody wrists open with the butter knife that they leave us with dinner," Al snapped irritably. "This seems to be a slightly more monotonous but less humiliating alternative."

"You can always tell when he's annoyed when he starts talking like you," Scorpius informed Rose in a stage whisper.

She resisted the temptation to hit him. But only because he was going to help her.

———

"Have you decided on a pair of shoes yet?"

Hermione put her feet up on Severus' coffee table and leaned back far enough that she could see out of the sitting room and into the hallway.

"Have some patience—we're going to be waiting a while."

As it was obviously true, she had no answer to that. They had slipped away from the shouting match that had erupted before they reached the foyer of the main house; by the time they made it to his bungalow, Hermione felt certain that the volume could be measured on the Richter Scale.

"It would be nice to have the Portkey set up by then."

He reappeared, dangling the map-shoe in front of him. "Kindly remove your feet from my furniture," he ordered, but it was the tired sort of command that didn't expect obedience.

"I expect Lucius has house-elves that can clean it for you." A note of distaste crept, unbidden, into her tone.

"I don't allow them anywhere near my quarters." He scowled, sitting in the sofa opposite her.

"I suppose it would be too much to expect that this is out of common decency?"

"They like to reorganise my filing system. Bloody creatures can't understand that I want things arranged according to dates rather than having it all alphabetised."

Hermione, who had a similar relationship with legal files, nodded sympathetically. "The bloody Ministry elves do the same thing. I had to ward my office and the records room, and convince Percy to let me hire file clerks. Thankfully, he's Minister of Magic now," she added fervently.

"At the rate you've moved up, you'll be next." Something in his voice warned her against taking his words for mockery, but she snorted nonetheless.

"I wouldn't do it for all the gold in Gringotts. I'd be more wildly unpopular than Fudge was in his final days and absolutely horrible at it."

"You've single-handedly turned around a department that has been corrupt for centuries. With the current Minister's help of course."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "He was more interested in adapting laws about cauldron thickness so that we'd be able to import cheaper goods. The lowering of prices looked good in the campaign, even though everyone's children were suffering from third degree burns."

"The Weasleys are a charming family," he commented, and she had to admire the unflinching way the words rolled off his tongue. They were almost believable.

"We could always stage a séance, resurrect you, and put your name in for Minister of Magic," she suggested brightly. "You're certainly adept at lying."

"It's why I'm still alive." He paused to smile, before continuing. "Now, I believe we were about to create a Portkey."

She nodded, and he placed the old shoe on the coffee table between them.

"In order to activate the tracking spell and imprint the destination on the Portkey at once, I'll need you to open up a channel to your magic. You have done this before, haven't you?"

She had. It was a common training exercise for all low-level Ministry employees, although the only department that performed it in practice on a regular basis was Mysteries.

Placing her wand on the table so that the point was facing him, she closed her eyes and silently chanted the incantation. He was there a moment later, tugging at a thread in her mind, and she had to fight the instinct to cut him off. It was far easier being the invader than the invaded.

What felt like barely a moment later, his presence was gone and she opened her eyes.

"You didn't trust me," he said, impassive.

"Not instinctually, no. Would you trust me?"

His eyes were searching as they scanned her. It seemed to Hermione that he was deliberating something, and when the words came they were careful, hesitant. "Yes. I think that I would."

Heat rose in her face, and she glanced quickly down at the rug. It was Persian and wouldn't have suited Lucius' modern, clean-edged décor at all, but seemed perfectly at home in this smaller house crammed with books. "Is it done?"

He noticed her bewilderment and chose not to address it, gesturing to the shoe instead. "Of course it is. Please don't touch it."

Her expression clearly showed her lack of amusement. "Because that's something that I would do."

"I can't say that I know you well enough to know that you won't do something completely irrational."

Sucking in a breath of air that bespoke a rant, she began, "Yes, that's me. The irrational woman—"

He was saved by the entry of Lucius, who was looking wild-eyed and frantic.

"We have about five minutes until Draco comes bursting in here, demanding to come along."

"I take it that that would be a bad thing?" Severus asked, gesturing towards the shoe.

"I'm not losing my son and grandson at once," Lucius snapped. "Now, on the count of three, grab the Portkey."

Hermione briefly considered telling him that his logic was flawed, but he was already counting and she wasn't about to left behind. She grasped it in unison with the two men, and felt her stomach jolt as they disappeared.

———

Severus had been right. There was mud, and lots of it.

There was also a crumbling ruin of a castle, but they had to cross four hundred yards of mud to reach it. He hated mud.

Even though he hadn't worn them in over a decade, he found himself silently grateful to the brief hiking phase that had led him to purchase appropriate boots. Neither Lucius nor Hermione had anything in the realm of practicality, although it only took a moment before she transfigured hers from heels into sensible trainers. Lucius lagged behind, attempting to pick his way through the dry patches, before giving up and casting a dirt-repelling charm.

As they reached the crest of a knoll, Severus was forced to revaluate the situation. It was still four hundred yards of muddy field, but with a colony of trolls.

Beside him, he heard Hermione mutter, "Couldn't they at least wait under the draw bridge?" and had to suppress a smile.

"I think that we'll have better luck sneaking past them," Lucius remarked, swishing his wand experimentally. "Somehow I doubt that these can win against wooden clubs."

"Harry, Ron, and I took one out in our first year," Hermione scoffed. "It won't be that hard."

"One," Severus emphasised. "Not twenty. And it wasn't even fully grown."

"Stun one, and expect to be clubbed over the head a moment later. They may look idiotic, but they know enough to survive." Lucius raised his eyebrow at Hermione. "Unless you have an idea, of course."

"Stun them from a distance?" she suggested.

———

In the end, it was as simple as a cloaking spell and trying not to complain too loudly. Rain fell, as the looming grey sky had promised, and Hermione wished that she had had the sense to bring a jacket.

She wasn't entirely certain which country they were in, although the flat wasteland around them suggested that it wasn't anywhere near the Alps; she ought to have had the sense to dress for cooler weather.

Except, of course, that her suitcase was still in a hotel room in Florence, the only remaining clue that this was intended to be a vacation. She was on the verge of bartering with nameless deities—she would never take a day off of work again, as long as said god promised to keep her children safe.

It was almost too easy, Hermione decided as they climbed the steps up to the door—new and wooden, which suggested the presence of someone who wasn't a troll. She tried to open it, but it wouldn't budge. _Alohomora_ also failed.

From behind, a troll let out a terrifying roar, and she spun around just in time to see it fling itself facedown in the mud.

"Bath time," Lucius murmured, but she could read the same relief she felt in his face.

Severus tried the door again, but to no avail. Hermione scowled at him.

"I think that I know how to open…" She trailed off at the sound of wind and looked up in time to see a myriad of coloured birds rise up from the battlements before darting down towards them.

———

Frustrated both with Rose's determination and his own incompetence, Scorpius broke his concentration by jerking his chin up so that he was no longer staring blankly at the stone floor. It wasn't working, wasn't going to work, and she was being an idiot for even trying.

Which meant that he nearly leapt out of his skin when a flash that hit the opposite wall accompanied the motion.

Rose glanced up just in time to see it and turned to face him, gaping. "What did you do?"

"I…don't know." He stared at the place that the spurt of magic had dissolved into the bricks.

"Can you do it again?"

Rose seemed to be resisting the urge to prod him in excitement; her eyes bulged slightly as though he were a particularly fascinating sub-species of hippogriff and she a circus trainer.

"No idea."

"Well, can you try?"

Al raised his head from where it had been slumped and looked at them with bleary eyes. "What happened?" he mumbled.

With a smirk, Scorpius realised he had been sleeping. "Wandless magic," he replied.


	5. Chapter 4

**Title:** Illusory

**Recipient:** lj user"pigwidgeon37"

**Rating:** Mature

**Warnings:** Possible waterboarding of the English language, for which I profusely apologise, and some minor slashy bits.

**For the prompts:** 1) Some time during the Battle of Hogwarts, Hermione feels compelled to go back to the Shrieking Shack. Snape's body is gone. There are a few more of his memories clinging to the blood on the floor, though. Hermione collects them. What they are, what she does with them and when, is up to the author. Snape is, of course alive.

3) After the Battle, Lucius goes back to the Shrieking Shack and finds an almost-dead Severus. He takes him to a secret location (author's choice) and remains there with him. Hermione Granger, debutante divorcee after 25 years of marriage and now head of Magical Law Enforcement, takes a well-deserved holiday very near the secret location. Threesome ensues.

**Summary:** Hermione didn't expect her first vacation in years (Vegas doesn't count) to include kidnap, a man who is supposed to be dead, or Lucius Malfoy—but no one asked her opinion. Now, she has to rescue her daughter from a situation where too many things look familiar and deal with a nightmare that goes back to the aftermath of the final battle.

**Notes:** Thanks to name withheld, as well as the person who spent hours coming up with wildly improbable car accident scenarios with me, although I doubt that he realises what it went towards.

**Part Four**

The key sat in her outstretched hand, butterfly wings unfolded and pumping slightly. Some part of her mind was telling her that it wasn't a butterfly but a moth, not with wings like that. Her heart beat more rapidly as she contemplated the door looming in front of her, threatening.

She glanced quickly at Severus, and he nodded once, quickly. Lucius was pressing on her from the other side, and she found it comfortingly solid as she closed her hand and felt the wings give a sickening crunch. Mechanically, the key slid into the lock—her hand didn't seem to be anything more than a guide—and she pushed.

A part of her was already expecting the scene that greeted her, had been expecting it since the troll, and it was the same part that condensed with fear at the sight. The rest of her was merely curious.

Harry and Ron were waiting for her on the otherwise empty chessboard, but they were Harry and Ron, as she had first known them. More importantly, this wasn't the Ron whom she had divorced; his face was young and expectant, the expression she had only learned to refuse in the last days of their marriage.

Oblivious to the voices of the men beside her, she ran to meet them—

—and felt her legs turn to marble the moment her feet touched the board.

Looking down was sluggish and a bit painful, as though she were cracking open the back of her neck, but she forced herself to do it. It was with a flood of horror that she recognised the familiar bell shape that her body had taken on.

———

The scream was the first indication that all was not as it should be. Severus' gaze followed Hermione to where she stood, immobile, in the centre of the entrance hall.

"Idiot," Lucius breathed, but there was enough relief in his voice to catch Severus off-guard. "Didn't her mother tell her not to go skipping into crumbling ruins?"

A second shriek prompted him to reply. "I don't quite think that's the problem."

He stepped in cautiously, holding out his wand for light, but it only emphasised the darkness. It made him uneasy; it was barely mid-afternoon, and surely there must be windows.

"Hermione?" he whispered, the name echoing back to him. She didn't respond, so he tried again—louder.

"Severus?"

The voice came from her direction, but it wasn't hers. He knew it in spite of himself, and, ignoring the fact that it was the wrong organ altogether, tried to close his eyes against it.

"Severus?"

His eyes couldn't help it; they snapped open.

"What kind of name is Severus, anyway?"

He didn't have to look to know that he was wearing that same, oversized coat and shoes three sizes too small. The feeling of swimming in clothing was familiar to him, natural, almost, like the red-haired girl holding her hand out to him expectantly.

"I've been waiting for you, you know. Such a long time."

His instincts told him to look back at Lucius, but she drew him forward with the slightest touch of her hand to his wrist. He knew better than to trust her, but she didn't need to know that.

"Why," he asked, "have you been waiting for me?"

"To give you your memories, of course. Don't you want them? I've been saving them for you."

She gestured grandly to a workbench behind her, where Hermione had been standing a moment before, with vials and bowls filled with his memories.

"What have you done with Gra—Hermione?" he croaked, evading the question.

"Who?" She looked at him blankly. "Sev, you're not well. You need your memories."

He shook his head, swallowing hard, and looked behind him, but Lucius wasn't there.

"I've taken care of your horrible Slytherin friend, but you need to listen to me." Selecting a bowl, she brought it over to him, and raised it so that his nose nearly touched the memory. "Do you remember this? It's the day that you told me about Hogwarts. You need it; it will make you well."

"There's nothing wrong with me." He tried to step back, but the bowl only drew closer to his face.

"Yes, there is. You'll see."

The rim of the bowl brushed against his lips and he tried to keep them pursed shut, but she was insistent.

"Drink up."

———

"Knight to C-4."

Hermione couldn't explain how she was able to see the piece knocked to the ground without eyes, but she did. It meant that she also realised that Ron was losing, and that the fellow black pieces were being knocked down with violent triumph.

She rotated to look at him—the king—and was terrified at the lack of expression that met her. Harry had already collapsed and been dragged to the side of the board, and she wasn't entirely certain that he was still breathing.

Ron directed another few pieces on similar suicide missions, his lip curling unpleasantly as they were decimated, before turning that awful gaze on her. With a sudden stab of terror, she realised that they were the only remaining players.

_Idiot_ she wanted to yell, but marble figurines didn't have voices. _We'll never be able to do it now._

In the back of her mind, existing alongside the idea that there was something important that needed to be done, was that something was unspeakably wrong with this situation.

Wrong with him.

Even when she had deliberately tried to provoke him into an argument, he hadn't been cruel. Insensitive and oblivious, certainly, but he had never meant to hurt her.

She had managed that quite nicely on her own.

He smiled in that same disturbing way, and everything seemed to slide into place. Not only was this not Ron, it wasn't even a decent impersonation.

Rational thought broke through, shattering the marble in a fan around her, and she forced open her eyes to find that she was alone.

———

At first he only swallowed out of instinct, because he felt the liquid dribbling out of the corners of his mouth and filling his nose and it had seemed that there was no choice. Consume or drown. Now, he drank greedily from the bowl, allowing the memories to flash past him as Lily's hand sat firmly on his shoulder and she whispered words of encouragement in his ears.

It was tumultuous—one moment he was hanging upside down, the next his father was hammering at his bedroom door—but he clung to her words that it was good for him.

That it would make him well.

Gradually, he became aware of someone else whispering his name, but it was faint, drowned out in his suddenly crowded consciousness. Lily heard it too, because she was uncorking a bottle and pouring it into a goblet as though it were wine. He reached out to grasp it, but his hand was shaking enough that it slid through his fingers.

"You can't expect me to let you waste that?" Her face contorted with fury, but her voice was his mother's, cajoling him to finish his mashed potatoes.

Shaking his head, he tried to drop obediently to his knees, but something held him back.

"Clean it up." Her shape was changing too, into a formidable and towering figure.

The whispering turned into a shout that made his ears ring, but he shook whatever it was off and dropped to the ground. Pain shot through his knees, but he ignored it in favour of scrambling to regain the memories and trying to dodge his mother's pointed shoe as it swung toward his ribs.

"Severus! It's not real!"

The jolt sent his mother out of focus long enough that he could see Hermione kneeling beside him. Eileen returned a moment later, but he screwed his eyes shut and willed her away.

"It's okay. You're okay," Hermione whispered as he curled into the foetal position. "She's gone."

One hand rested on his forehead as the other wiped away tears that had been streaming down his cheeks.

"What was that?" he asked between gasps.

She shook her head. "I have no idea."

He was still panting when he heard Lucius' yell from somewhere across the room. Not caring whether or not he had recovered his breath, he rolled to his feet and followed the noise.

———

This time, Hermione was expecting to be pulled in, and braced herself for it, but almost nothing happened. The room became bright and welcoming; the window overlooked a vineyard and Lucius stared out into it, allowing the letter to drop numbly from his hands.

"What's going on?" Severus asked her, clearly bewildered.

"This is what he's afraid of," she replied. "As long as we're touching him, we can see it too. I think."

Careful to keep her hand in contact with him, she bent down and retrieved the parchment.

"What is it?"

"That's what I'm finding out."

Her hand was trembling too much to smooth out the creases, but the letter seemed to want to fall open.

_Father,_

_I regret to inform you of the passing of my mother and your wife. Funeral services will be held one week from today._

_It is also left to me to tell you that I have thought about the matter on which you wrote, and have come to the conclusion that it would be best for all involved to keep Scorpius from your influence._

There was no signature, no explanation. Hermione felt thoughts rearrange themselves in her mind as she passed the letter to Severus—it was like finally finding the right lens prescription. Squinting was rendered an unnecessary part of scrutiny.

"Is it fear or is it helplessness?" she asked.

Severus stared at her blankly.

"This spell," she clarified. "Fear is easy enough to deal with, but Lucius is helpless against Draco, I couldn't stop Ron from destroying us, and you…couldn't refuse her. If the spell seeks out and exploits the things that render us helpless…"

Comprehension dawned. "Unless all of us fear essentially the same thing…"

He continued talking, but the words flickered in and out—too quiet, she thought, desperately trying to pay attention.

Why wouldn't he speak more loudly?

The lights in the room dimmed, until it seemed to be twilight. Paint flaked off of the stairs, making them appear eerily grey, and she grasped the banister, heart in mouth. Her subconscious knew that it was a nightmare, a twisted memory, but it was more frightening realistic than years of recurring dreams.

She looked down, searching for the inevitable, but there were no memories on the stairs. It meant…

Trying not to think what it meant, she pushed open the door the rest of the way, and felt her stomach lurch.

Blood pooled around him; the strange angle of his head was emphasised by the whiteness of his face against it. She approached gingerly, kneeling beside him to feel for a pulse.

Her hand had barely touched him when his eyes snapped open.

"Is this yours or mine?" he asked.

She contemplated the immaculate detail, the creaking of the stairs, the smell of dried blood, and reached for the locket around her throat. "Mine. I think."

———

Another spark, but it fizzled out. Scorpius avoided Rose's assessing gaze and Al's trusting one, instead focussing on the boy still unconscious against the wall.

He shook his head. "Sorry. I don't know what I did."

"It's okay," Rose said, too lost in thought to sound comforting. "You did better than either of us."

Al was biting his bottom lip and staring at the wall. For a single, horrible second Scorpius thought that he was going to cry, but instead he crawled over into the corner and began to pick at the mortar.

"The wall," he said. "I think it's peeling."

———

Severus allowed himself to be led from the Shrieking Shack by the hand, feeling numb. He didn't quite believe Hermione when she said that this was her fear, not his—she wasn't the one who had been lying in a pool of her own blood.

It didn't explain why she had been present in the first place, but there were other things to think of. Like finding Lucius.

The light was even stranger outside, giving everything a bluish tinge. Hermione tightened her grasp around his wrist, and he wondered if he was supposed to feel this light-headed, as though he were suffering some sort of severe blood loss, if it were just illusion.

"Are you all right?" she asked, looking around them frantically. He followed her gaze, but they were surrounded by forest.

He nodded stiffly, not quite trusting his voice.

"I think that you're the one that can find Lucius. If I managed to find you in my worst fear, then you should be able to find him. You're the one who is in love with him—you have to be afraid of something happening to him."

In any less dire situation, he would have found the words to protest, or at least contemplate any hidden meaning. Instead, he just nodded dumbly, wondering if he could bring about one of the hallucinations.

The memory had barely risen to his mind when the trees around them dissolved and they were left standing, hand-in-hand, before a smashed-up vintage Benz in the pouring rain.

———

Rose was crouching next to Al in the space of the second. "What do you mean, it's peeling? The paint?"

"It's a stone wall, Weasley," Scorpius drawled, not moving. "There _is _no paint."

Ignoring him, she looked at what Al was tugging at, and realised that he was right. The layer of brick was curling off like old wallpaper, revealing older, crumbling stones beneath.

"If we can get it off, we might be able to escape," Al said. "We just need to—ow!"

"What is it?" Rose watched him clutch his right hand in pain, feeling a stab of alarm.

"It burned me!" Al revealed the red mark long enough that she could wince sympathetically.

"Let me see," Scorpius said, joining them.

As he examined Al's wound, Rose prodded piece of wall that had been revealed with a finger, trying to wiggle it loose. When that failed, she tugged at the bit that was curling, and it peeled off easily in a strip. It _was _like wallpaper, except that the texture was strange and prickled her skin, like receiving a gentle electrical shock. She picked at the edge of where she had already peeled, and felt pain shoot up through her arm.

"Fuck!"

"I told you it hurt," Al remarked, as Scorpius sniggered.

"You're also the one who was inconsolable when you fell the entire half a foot off of your toy broomstick," she pointed out, sucking on her finger too cool it. "Anyway, if we can pull enough of this off, we should be able to dig our way out. The bricks are loose."

"And bring the entire building down on us?" She could tell that Scorpius was trying to scoff at her, but seemed to be failing miserably because a hopeful grin was twitching at the corners of his mouth.

"Live free or die, Malfoy," she quipped dryly. "It's what I'm planning on."

———

She knelt next to the overturned car on the lakeshore, peering through the spider web of shattered glass to see if Lucius was in there. Between the shards and the rain streaming down them, all she could make out was a vaguely head-shaped blur that wasn't moving, and her breath caught in her lungs.

"The bloody idiot thought it would be a good idea to go careening down the deserted road in a rainstorm," said Severus quietly, crouching next to her. "It was right after Narcissa died and I'm not entirely sure that he wasn't feeling suicidal, even though he claims it was because the road was washed away and his windows were fogged."

"You don't believe him, then?" She twisted so that she was looking at him, and pushed back her dripping hair from his face.

He seemed to be fighting to find the right words to express his emotions, because his face was contorting rapidly, vacillating between fury and sorrow. "I don't know what to believe," he said finally. "Except that he would have died if it hadn't been for a couple of lost tourists who happened to be driving by."

He yanked at the handle in a sudden, vicious movement, but the top of the frame was too crumpled to allow for movement. Mutely, Hermione offered a hand and helped him to his feet.

"But he didn't," she pointed out gently, wondering if the water running down his face was entirely rain. "And if he had, it wouldn't have been your fault."

His expression crumpled, twisting into some forthright emotion so intense that it both terrified her and made something swell in her chest until her heart felt as though it were about to burst. What made her kiss him wasn't the sadness or the terror or the love, but the fact that he was allowing her to see them, that she was allowed to look into his mind through his eyes.

He could have used Occlumency or turned away, but he didn't.

It wasn't at all like the first time that they had kissed. There was none of the hesitation or uncertainty, only a sudden, fierce battle of their tongues as her hands clutched his shoulders, pulling him in more tightly. He grasped the middle of her back powerfully enough that she felt certain that they were melding together in some desperate and futile attempt not to be divided—there was lust, of course, but also a need to feel connected, to be touched—

"Severus, you really are making a habit of not waiting for me."

She felt his sob of relief against her lips, and tightened her hold on him, as though expecting his legs to give out. She supported him for a moment longer, before he straightened and smoothed the blind relief from his face.

"Maybe," Hermione commented as she watched Lucius disentangle himself from the wreckage, "it's a sign that you should stop taking your bloody time."

———

Several burnt fingers and a great deal of cursing later, the three of them had managed to clear away a space large enough to crawl through. Worn out and faced with decrepit rock, they paused, eyeing one another without speaking.

Rose picked anxiously at a brick, scraping out ancient mortar with a fingernail as she waited for some sort of initiative from one of the others. It didn't come.

Finally, she remarked, "When we get through, one of us is going to have to carry Marco." _And it can't be me_ she added, considering his built frame. It wouldn't be Al either, who was three inches shorter than her and still as scrawny as any twelve-year-old.

"It's all right," Scorpius said with an exaggerated sigh. "I saw this coming at least half an hour ago."

Both Al and Rose visibly relaxed, and he said, "We still need to get through the actual wall. How are we going to do _that_?"

She examined her nails, wondering how long, precisely, it would take them to grow back if they were torn from their beds.

Al followed her gaze, eyes widening. "There's no way we can dig through a wall with our bare hands."

"Like we couldn't perform wandless magic? There isn't much in the way of options," she pointed out acerbically. "Besides, it will make for a great escape story when we get back to Hogwarts."

The unspoken 'if', hung between them momentarily, before both Al and Rose began scratching at the spaces between the bricks with more vigour.

"In about five seconds, the two of you are going to be excessively grateful that I, at least, have sense," Scorpius said, reaching behind him with a smirk.

Rose paused to glance over at him. "What have you done now?"

"Because," he said, pulling a butter knife out of the waistband of his pants, "I thought that this might come in useful as we were eating dinner last night."

It wasn't quite a power drill, Rose thought as he shuffled between them and began hacking at the wall, but it was better than the alternative, and it took significantly less time to push the first brick out of its slot than it otherwise would have. Rose took the now-curved knife to the one beneath the space, thinking that it would be less likely to bring the entire wall down than one beside it. Scorpius, it seemed, had also considered this, as he dragged Marco to the far side of the room, looking somewhat sheepish.

"After the fuss you made over him, it seems a waste to have him crushed by bits of renegade wall."

Her only reply was to smile at him gratefully and push the last bits of her brick out of the hole before passing the knife to Al.

———

It was back to being an ordinary room again, which bothered Hermione more than anything else. It meant that she could look around her and see how little they had moved since entering, the sliver of light from the half-open door beckoning to them, and precisely how little space was left before the foyer was done and they had the option of travelling up or down. One of her hands was tucked into Severus', while the other was having its circulation cut off by Lucius' grasp. He seemed to have misunderstood the information, assuming that the more forceful the physical contact, the less likely they were to be separated.

Then again, they were no longer being assailed by the hallucinations, so maybe there was something to it.

"Which direction?" Lucius asked when they reached the foyer.

The staircase leading up had the look of something that had once been architecturally grandiose, but hadn't aged well. The two halves that led up on either side of them seemed to be more of a slope than individual steps and the banister only existed in sections; the broader flight in front of them that led down toward a door that was chained shut was hardly better.

"That depends if you want to be beneath several tonnes of rock or landing on it when the building collapses." Severus tilted his head up to look at the ceiling, squinting slightly to bring it into clear view.

"I don't think that the stairs that go down will take us under the castle." Hermione bit her lip, examining the second set of doors. "It's probably just the ground-level floor. And unless we're dealing with a fairytale, I doubt that we're going to find our children in the topmost tower of the castle. If they're there, we may as well prepare to fight dragons as well."

"I suppose this means that we're going down, then," Lucius said, mockingly cheerful.

"That's his way of saying, 'Go forth and we shall follow'," Severus muttered in her ear, and she shot him a grateful look as he squeezed her hand comfortingly.

"O fearless leader," Lucius added, with the sort of self-satisfied tone that meant he thought he was being particularly clever. He followed it with a strange bark of laughter that caused her to exchange worried glances with Severus.

———

The sophistication of Lucius' sense of humour was inversely proportional to his level of fear. Which meant that when the line between entertaining and desperate was crossed, it did not bode well for his state of mind.

Lewd, Severus had discovered quite early in their acquaintance, was normal; lame was cause for concern. Hysterical laughter, on the other hand, was something that he hadn't heard in over a decade. It meant that the time for ringing up the nearest asylum and inquiring about their meal plan was nearing more rapidly than he would like.

That Lucius was leading them down the steps and pushing open the door in his obviously unstable state meant that Severus was watching the other man particularly closely to ensure that he didn't trip on an uneven stair and pull the rest of them down with him.

He was having less success with the door, driving his side into it repeatedly with a kind of desperation that told him volumes more than an analysis of laughter ever could. Hermione, whose right arm was being jerked violently at every attempt, was fumbling for her pocket with the hand that Severus was clutching and appealing to him with a worried look. Catching her meaning, he used his free hand to pull out his wand and aimed it at the door just as Lucius flung himself at it a final time.

Severus had braced himself against this inevitability, but nevertheless found his shoulder dislocating with a sickening crunch as he was yanked forward to land on top of Hermione.

"Fuck," breathed Lucius. "The Italian cuisine has _not _worked wonders for your body mass, Severus."

He assumed that this meant Lucius was regaining his sense of humour.

"And yet," Hermione replied, clearly starved for air, "I swear I can feel every bone in his body."

"I don't think that I can move my arm," he groaned, rolling off them. "If _you _had been behaving like a rational human being…"

He broke off when he noticed the room that they had entered. The contrast with the entranceway couldn't have been greater; it was a dining hall that someone had clearly decorated with a great deal of care and a deep love of red brocade. A table sat in the centre, stretching through most of the impressive length of the room and laden with baskets and dishes of food; the smell wafted over in a sudden wave.

"Is this another hallucination?" Hermione asked, prodding the rug beneath them.

"Unless one of us has some overwhelming terror when it comes to the combination of red, gold, and velvet…"

Hermione tightened her lips distastefully. "It does remind me of the time that Molly redecorated the Burrow and I had to pretend to like it because she was babysitting Hugo…but that had more to do with my gag reflex than anything else."

"It could relate to my worry that Scorpius belongs in Gryffindor." Lucius raised himself to his feet slowly. "Being friends with the Potter brat is giving him strange ideas about noble self-sacrifice."

Some of these strange ideas had apparently rubbed off, as Lucius cast a quick healing charm on Severus' shoulder before turning to survey the room properly. The bones ground against each other a second time before slipping into place and he flexed his hand experimentally. Hermione offered a hand to help him up, which he accepted; they instinctively drew closer together at the sound of chilling laughter coming from the far corner.

A small, bald man with a horribly disfigured face followed it. At first, Severus combined it with the hunched over scuttle and assumed it was a birth defect, but as he grew closer, he realised that it was burnt.

He stopped just short of Lucius and examined the three of them. "I've been waiting rather anxiously for you, although you shouldn't have arrived quite so soon. I'm not fully prepared."

Lucius' shoulders tensed as he reached for his wand. "I won't be too offended if you bring us the children."

"It doesn't matter for you, you see," he said, fidgeting. "You son isn't a part of this. And, Severus, I don't see why you're here, unless it's yet another misguided attempt to protect the boy. Mr Potter and Miss Granger will stay, and learn what it means to stand against the Dark Lord. It's such a pity that I couldn't find Mr Weasley to complete my collection of… What do you call them, Severus? Dunderheads?"

Severus nodded in agreement, realisation sliding an icy block of horror into the pit of his stomach. He glanced over at Hermione to see if she had come to the same conclusion to see that all of the colour had dropped out of her face, and that she was mouthing, "Oh my God," repeatedly.

Lucius just looked bewildered.

———

When the hole was finally large enough to fit through, Al stuck his head in and looked around. "It's another cell," he informed them. "But it hasn't got the glamour on it, and the door is made of rusted-out bars."

"What are you waiting for?" Scorpius gestured to say that they should climb through, then lifted Marco with a slight grunt. "I'll have to pass this oaf through to you."

Following Al, Rose slid through headfirst, scraping her belly on the jagged edges. Bracing herself with her arms, she pulled her legs the rest of the way and heard her jeans rip. Al steadied her enough that she could stand and brush herself off.

"Thanks," she said, surveying the damage. The tear stretched from just below her knee to her ankle. "I don't think that I'll be keeping these."

"Okay, he's coming," Scorpius called to them, and Marco's head appeared near Rose's thigh, lolling to one side.

She grabbed his upper arms and braced his head. "Take his torso," she told Al as she helped Scorpius bring him through.

The other boy appeared a moment later, surveying the bars that held them in and rattling them a few times experimentally. "We can either try to saw through them with the knife, which probably won't do much good, or we can rip the door off the wall. The rock is crumbling enough for that."

"And bring the building down on our heads?" Rose asked. "Great idea."

"We don't know that," Al pointed out. "The chances are that it's our only way out, unless we want to try sawing through iron, which will take ages."

"Rusted out iron," she protested.

"With a butter knife?"

Rose sent Al a look that was equal parts amusement and annoyance. "Fine. Let's demolish this building."

———

Somewhere over Eastern Europe, Harry Potter clutched the side of the flying Mercedes Benz, trying to ignore the thing—he couldn't decide whether it was bile or panic—that was rising up in him.

Malfoy was even worse at driving than Ron, and he didn't want to think about what would happen if the car stalled in mid-air.

"You all right, Potter?"

_No_, Harry wanted to say. _You just Apparated into my living room to tell me that my son has gone missing while he was visiting your father—which I didn't fucking know about—and then dragged me off to Italy and now I'm in a car—a _flying _car—with someone who doesn't know what a clutch is, let alone how to work it, and I'm experiencing motion sickness._

But, he thought, that would be immature. Instead, he sneered and remarked, as casually as possible when one's complexion resembled that of a frog, "Your father has a flying car? Didn't Arthur Weasley have one of those thirty years ago?"

"Luckily for you, it's a flying car with tracking spells and a functioning petrol gage."

Malfoy wasn't allowed to look that calm, Harry decided. Not when Al was missing and it was his bloody fault.

"I still can't believe that you didn't think to let me know that my son was going with your son to visit your murdering bastard of a father in Italy."

_That's right_, Harry thought. _Keep it conversational._

Malfoy's knuckles went white as he clutched the steering wheel. "I wrote you a bloody three page letter about the situation and made sure that Al had a signed form from you before he left the country. It isn't my fault if your brat of a son forged it."

"And of course it was _my _son," Harry shot back hotly.

Scorpius had visited on holidays; Harry knew _exactly _how spoiled and demanding he was.

"Potter," Malfoy said with a long-suffering sigh, "obviously it was a combined effort. Obviously I'm not letting Scorpius get away with it. Just get over yourself, please. For your own sanity as much as mine."

———

It was clear enough to Hermione that Quirrell had, at some point in the last three decades, completely gone off his rocker. What was unclear was how this would affect the outcome.

His plan, as far as she could tell, had been poorly conceived, unless it was intentionally formed that way in order to ensnare them, in which case it had succeeded rather nicely. And, he kept switching between knowing who they were and thinking that she, Harry, and Draco were the children that he had in captivity. The fact that he knew her daughter's name in his saner moments worried her; his open-mouthed crazed stare as he detailed the punishments he would like to visit on Harry made her stomach clench with terror.

That he was still alive just made her furious; it was yet another lie that Dumbledore had told them.

And he wouldn't bloody shut up.

Something pressed against her lower back, nearly making her jump.

"It's just me," Severus whispered, barely moving his lips. "Don't move."

It was a test of will not to fidget as his hands moved along the back of her waistband until he found her wand and dislodged it. She had to admire the way that his torso didn't move with his arm from the corner of his eye, reaching her own hand behind her as though to scratch an itch until her fingers closed around the wood.

———

With a final shove, the door came dislodged, bringing with it crumbled rocks and mortar. Somewhere in the cloud that suddenly surrounded them, Al could hear Rose coughing and swearing violently. Small rocks bounced off of him, one of them clipping him painfully on the forehead.

Once the dust cleared, he rubbed it from his eyes and looked around. Both Scorpius and Rose were coated in something that turned their hair white, and he suspected that he was as well, but the doorway was clear enough to leave by, and he felt relief settle on his shoulder. Scorpius automatically retrieved Marco, and the three of them began picking their way through the rubble.

"He's really the luckiest one of all of us," Scorpius remarked, cheered by their success as he adjusted his grip on the boy. "He gets to sleep through the whole thing, and a Get Out of Jail Free card in the deal."

"We aren't out yet," Rose reminded him grimly, and Al, in spite of his inclination to do otherwise, had to agree.

———

"Where are we going, anyway?" Harry asked, promising himself that he wouldn't look down. Instead, he focused on a ruin that was coming into focus just over the horizon.

"Moldova."

The car gave a nasty lurch, and he couldn't help it. If he was going to die, he wanted to at least see where.

"And where are we now?" Harry knew that the sulky inflection in his voice was childish, but he decided that he was entitled to it right now.

"Moldova."

"Oh," he said. "Right. Shouldn't we be heading down?"

The car gave another jerk, and he was tempted to glance above him to see if he had left any major organs behind.

"That's what we're doing," Malfoy replied tersely, aiming the front bumper at the ground at a dangerous angle.

Harry wanted to point out that he didn't have to adjust anything—that was, after all, the purpose of gravity—but decided that he didn't want that to be remembered as his last words. Not that there was anyone around to record it except Malfoy and if he was going down, well, so was Malfoy.

Instead, he swallowed his terror and clutched the other man's bicep with a strength that was only granted to men about to die. "We've given it a good run," he remarked sagely, closing his eyes before the Benz hit the ground.

"It's not over yet, Potter."

He waited, but the crash didn't come. Snapping one eye open, he kept a hand ready to cover it should the need arrive. It didn't; they had already landed.

It took him another moment to realise that the clouds had not suddenly thickened, but that the large, dark mass above them was actually a troll.

Somehow, he didn't find the fact that it was not yet fully grown comforting.

———

Severus held his wand tightly in his palm, breathing more easily now that Hermione had hers as well. From his vantage point, he could see that the colour had drained from Lucius' face and he was trembling as the burned man chatted with him, almost conversationally, but there was no time to worry about that. He just needed one of the two men to move away from the other enough that he could have a clear view of his target and then…

The thought was cut off by a door crashing open on the same side that Quirrell had entered from, and three figures stumbling in, quibbling audibly.

"You idiot, I told you that you'd lead us right into a trap," the girl was saying, and he would be blind not to recognise her as Hermione's daughter.

"Rose, just shut up for once," the blond boy snapped, catching sight of the adults across the room.

He knew Scorpius, of course, although Scorpius didn't know precisely who he was. He had also met the young Potter, albeit briefly—Albus Severus.

Severus gave himself a moment to shudder at the name. Clearly Potter had been under some sort of delusion at the time.

There wasn't time to ruminate on this further, as a second resounding crash from behind them heralded the arrival of more people. He swung his head around, careful to keep the wand concealed, and saw the bedraggled forms of Potter and Draco staggering in, with expressions that revealed their complete and utter bewilderment.

They froze in unison, and Severus turned back to see what they were gaping at.

Quirrell was clutching Rose before him, wand at her throat. Next to him, Hermione stared at them with a blank horror, a strangled sound coming out of her throat.

———

Much to her surprise, Rose wasn't afraid; she was furious. As far as she was concerned, Truth or Consequences, sawing through walls with a butter knife, and ripping doors off hinges were all very well, but after that she was hardly in the sort of mood to humour people who wanted to use her as their personal insurance possibility.

Especially not when they were trying to bait her mother.

"I'm not going to scream just because I'm a girl," she informed the man, aware that the words were practically a death wish. "If you want dramatics, you ought to have picked Scorpius."

His grip tightened, the wand digging into her clavicle more firmly.

"Mum," she called out, making sure her voice had a distinct whine to it, "he's discriminating against me."

Hermione didn't respond, but the dark man standing next to her did—at least, his eyes widened, and his hand twitched slightly.

Good, she thought. It meant he had a wand.

She relaxed slightly in the man's grip, letting him think that she wasn't about to struggle—it was like Quidditch, really—and let gravity do most of the work as she threw herself down and rolled away.

There was a flash of green light that flew over her head as four voices shouted, "_Avada Kedavra!_" and one cried, "_Expelliarmus!_"

"Harry," she heard her mother admonishing as she peeked up, "after two decades in the Auror department, you really ought to have learnt something new."

Even though she was generally against hysterics, Rose felt relief well up in her, bursting into a sob. Still, she had enough composure left to feel ashamed and made sure to keep her head hidden.


	6. Chapter 5

**Title:** Illusory

**Recipient:** lj user="pigwidgeon37"

**Rating:** Mature

**Warnings:** Possible waterboarding of the English language, for which I profusely apologise, and some minor slashy bits.

**For the prompts:** 1) Some time during the Battle of Hogwarts, Hermione feels compelled to go back to the Shrieking Shack. Snape's body is gone. There are a few more of his memories clinging to the blood on the floor, though. Hermione collects them. What they are, what she does with them and when, is up to the author. Snape is, of course alive.

3)After the Battle, Lucius goes back to the Shrieking Shack and finds an almost-dead Severus. He takes him to a secret location (author's choice) and remains there with him. Hermione Granger, debutante divorcee after 25 years of marriage and now head of Magical Law Enforcement, takes a well-deserved holiday very near the secret location. Threesome ensues.

**Summary:** Hermione didn't expect her first vacation in years (Vegas doesn't count) to include kidnap, a man who is supposed to be dead, or Lucius Malfoy—but no one asked her opinion. Now, she has to rescue her daughter from a situation where too many things look familiar and deal with a nightmare that goes back to the aftermath of the final battle.

**Notes:** Thanks to name withheld, as well as the person who spent hours coming up with wildly improbable car accident scenarios with me, although I doubt that he realises what it went towards.

**Part 5**

_The earth_

_shifts, bringing_

_the moment before focus, when_

_these tides recede; and we_

_see each other through the hardening scales of waking_

_stranded, astounded_

_in a drying world_

_we flounder, the air_

_ungainly in our new lungs_

_with sunlight steaming merciless on the shores of morning_

~"Pre-Amphibian", Margaret Atwood

Rose curled up in the armchair of the guest room, pretending to read, but really unwilling to let her mother out of her sight. Scorpius and Al had been torn away by their fathers, after enough angry shouting to shake the villa. Rose had made herself sparse, except to say goodbye, and her mother had, by some miracle, slept through the entire eruption.

She didn't fully understand the events of the past two days, but she didn't need to. Her mother had promised to explain them and, although Hermione showed no signs of awakening soon, Rose wasn't overly worried.

Years of insomnia, she was sure, took their toll.

It had briefly crossed her mind to owl her father and inform him of what had happened, but she had decided that that could wait as well. She knew full well that he loathed Scorpius' family, and the fact that they were currently staying with the Malfoy patriarch would no doubt send him over the edge—besides, with any luck, Harry had already told him.

The shades of red his face turned during fits of rage were only entertaining up to a point—especially since she was perfectly aware that she had inherited his complexion. However awry it may have gone, this was still _their _vacation, and she didn't want him intruding.

She wasn't surprised when, after a while, the door was nudged open and the dark man entered. Smiling at him hesitantly, she closed the book and vacated the chair so that he could sit down, settling herself on the end of the bed.

It wasn't the first time that he had checked in on Hermione.

"What are you reading?" he asked, careful to keep his voice low. The awkward hesitation told her that he wasn't accustomed to small talk.

She held it up so that he could read the spine. "It's a history of Italian unification that I found in the library."

"I wrote an article on Garibaldi once. Years ago."

"Oh," she said, viewing him with heightened curiosity. "I'm more interested in the reformation, personally, but I thought I'd branch out. How do you know about Muggle history?"

She clamped her mouth shut, worried that she was being impertinent, but he merely chuckled. "I could ask you the same thing."

Shrugging, she replied, "And I would tell you that I have retired Muggle grandparents who are overly fond of bookshops."

"It was the only thing that really interested my father. He was a…brilliant man, among other things. It's a pity that he was confined to a world where he couldn't use it."

There was a strange detachment to the way that he spoke of his father that intrigued her, almost as though he couldn't quite remember, but surely he was still too young for memory loss.

She decided not to remark on it; magic mixed with memory was a funny thing. It could make you remember things that had never happened, like the forty-eight hours of Marco's life that she had watched her mother reinvent. Then again, it could also help you recall the most obscure of details. Like blurred, poorly printed photographs that she had once pored over in the library. Like Uncle Harry's shocked exclamation at some point during the aftermath.

"You're Severus Snape, aren't you?" she asked, not really needing to hear his answer.

"And you know far more than you ought to."

She grinned cheekily. "Does this mean that I can blackmail you?"

———

Hermione woke up a day later to the sound of birds chirruping through the open window. Rolling the pillow around her ears, she privately decided that the person who decided it was a desirable thing to hear first thing in the morning had obviously never had a migraine.

Or any sort of headache at all.

After a period of time spent with her eyes screwed shut and the sounds muted, she pried one eyelid open, and then, sensing no immediate assault to her senses, another. Her headache, she realised as she propped herself up to examine the unfamiliar room, wasn't actually a migraine, but the result of sleeping too long: a combination of remnant exhaustion, dehydration, and hunger.

"Welcome back," said a voice that she knew she ought to recognise.

The sight of Severus sitting in the corner with a history magazine curled up in his hand brought everything flooding back.

"Good morning," she replied. "Where's Rose?"

He sighed, but there was no real annoyance behind it. "She's taken over my sitting room. Lucius, I think, makes her uneasy. And it's actually mid-afternoon."

"Oh." She felt bewildered—how much had she missed?

"Potter sent you a note." Severus gestured toward the bedside table, and she scooped up the sheet of paper, unfolding it. "It arrived last night."

"But I just said goodbye to him last night!" She paused, before adding, "Didn't I?"

"You've been asleep for two days."

Which meant that she had slept away nearly half of her vacation. She resolved to owl the department and request a second week off sometime in the near future; at the rate she was going, she would need a holiday from her holiday.

"Wonderful," she said grimly, skimming the letter. It was an extended apology that stretched over three pages, written in a hasty scribble that made her eyes water after only a few lines.

Harry hadn't reacted well to Severus still being alive, or to his son gallivanting around Italy without his permission. Or to Lucius' offer that she and Rose could stay with him, rather than the hotel.

Harry generally didn't react well to anything that was outside of his ordinary routine.

Hermione had mostly been amused by his rant as she swayed gently, completely drained. He had tried to lecture her about using an Unforgivable, and she pointed out that letting her daughter be killed by a madman who was supposed to be dead anyway was worse than breaking some law that had been instituted in 1652 by a Minister of Magic who wanted to stop mercy killings of Muggles in the campaign against Cromwell.

Not, perhaps, the most eloquent of arguments, but she was in no mood to argue.

He then turned on Snape, asking if he knew what a bureaucratic nightmare it would be to undo his death certificate and reintroduce him to the Wizarding world. When Snape responded that he was really quite happy being dead to the world, Harry made the mistake of appealing to Hermione, at which point he found himself up against not only her, but also Lucius and Draco, who were united on this one front, at least.

Al broke the ice with a well-timed remark about apoplectic fits long enough for all of them to dodge the trolls and roll the car, which was now slightly the worse for wear, out of the mud. It was now Lucius' turn to flirt with apoplexy as he took stock of the damage; the only thing that kept him from shouting was the nearby threat of trolls.

Dealing with Marco was the next problem to be solved—he was, Severus assured them, only under the influence of the Draught of Living Death—and altering his memory to include a mugging before administrating the antidote was simple enough. He would wake up in a hospital, with no memory of so much as meeting Rose.

Hermione remembered the way that her daughter's hands had knotted a green silk scarf as this was decided, and felt her heart go out to her. The opportunities to eat gelato with attractive Italian boys were few and far between; this she knew from bitter personal experience.

Still, she had no right to complain—two older and attractive men were nearly within her grasp, one of which apparently liked her daughter well enough to take her under his wing.

"Thank you," she finally said, setting the letter aside.

He raised an eyebrow in question.

"For looking after Rose while I was sleeping. I appreciate it."

"She's the last person who needs looking after," he scoffed. "She _invited _herself into my house as soon as she found out that I had my own library."

But the faint tinge of pink in his cheeks told her that he was pleased, and Lucius confirmed this as he appeared in the doorway.

"That's hardly an excuse to let her in," he pointed out, directing a tray-carrying house-elf to the bed. "You hexed me the last time I tried to borrow a book."

Hermione gave him a withering look, but accepted the tray with a quiet 'thank you'. Toast was stacked high on a plate, accompanied by eggs, sausages, and a bowl of cereal with the milk in a creamer on the side. "And you wonder why I didn't believe that you had a housekeeper named Helga. You know that most societies consider that slavery."

"Your tea is on its way, as I know you loathe coffee—shame, I have a wonderful espresso machine. And, for your information, your moral highness, Binky was a free elf looking for work when I took him in. I pay him in tea cosies and horseshoes."

"I'm so glad to hear that." If she had had any expectations for him, she would have expressed her disappointment. As she didn't, she tried her best to look disapproving whilst scarfing down toast.

"But that's neither here nor there," Lucius continued, oblivious to anything resembling sarcasm. "Only Severus is permitted to touch Severus' books, on pain of death. He tried to instate a borrowing card and teach me cataloguing systems."

"You cracked the spine!" Severus protested. "I've told Rose that she will replace anything that she damages."

"She also memorised the Dewey Decimal System when she was twelve," Hermione added helpfully, smirking slightly and not wanting to add that the reason she had been driven to such lengths was because of her constant arguments with Ron.

"The point is that you didn't tell her that on pain of death, and that you didn't know that she was a librarian in miniature before you let her in there. You've clearly gone off your head."

"I did know that," Severus shot back. "She told me that she wanted to work as an archivist for the Ministry."

Hermione's smugness in the face of Lucius' bewilderment dissipated when she realised, with a sinking feeling somewhere in her lower abdomen, that Severus Snape had learned things about her daughter in forty-eight hours that she had never bothered to contemplate. Of course, Rose knew theoretically that anything she wanted to discuss with her mother was fair game, but as Hermione thought back she couldn't remember her daughter ever taking advantage of that. She wondered if Ron knew…

Binky saved her from dwelling on it by arriving with the tea and asking, "Would Mistress like one lump of sugar or two?" with the typical disregard for pronouns.

———

Rose preferred the bungalow to the main building; it was small and, whilst not elaborately decorated with matching furniture, it was cosy. Papers were strewn across the floor of the library and she tread carefully so as not to disturb any of them. Although he hadn't said it in as many words, she understood implicitly that being here was a privilege, not a right.

She replaced the book on the Italian renaissance and moved along the shelves until she found translations of Roman works. Her grandmother had always insisted that she should read Ovid before she died, and, judging by the thickness of the collection she had in hand, it might very well take her a few decades. Particularly if she wanted to get round to other things in between.

Threading her way back across the room to the worn and sagging sofa, she curled up with her mysteriously refilled cup of tea to read.

———

"What exactly are you playing at?" Severus led the way down the flight of stairs furiously, not looking back to read Lucius' expression.

"I can't imagine what you mean."

The smoothness of his tone told Severus everything about it that he needed to know. Impassive. Polite. Perhaps a little mocking.

He froze. Inhaling deeply and clutching the banister until it dug into his bones painfully, he snapped, "Baiting me with all that talk about the library. Of course you know what I mean; you always do."

"I merely wanted to make her aware of your feelings for her."

"_What _feelings?" There were lines and Lucius was crossing every one of them. It wasn't as much the taunting that angered him, but the fact that he, Severus, was letting him get away with it.

"Coy doesn't suit you, Severus."

"I'm so glad we can at least agree about that." His rage was getting the better of him, and he spun around, about to close the distance with a punch. Lucius' proximity surprised him; he hadn't heard him descend the last few steps.

"You know that I—"

"Just drop it. Please."

But if Lucius knew when to stop, he would cease to be Lucius, so he ignored the pleading in Severus' tone and kept talking.

"—I don't mind—"

Something clenched furiously in Severus' chest, causing him to lash out with his fist before he could properly consider the consequences of the action. The other man stumbled backward, landing with a painful thud, and Severus stared at him with something like horror.

"Well," Lucius snarled, but there was still something like amusement behind his eyes. "Aren't you going to help an old man up?"

He knew it was a bad idea before he held out his hands, yet he felt compelled. The yank was anticipated, yet he found himself crashing down on the stair next to Lucius anyway.

"You bastard," he snarled, rolling over so that Lucius' arms were pinned down. "That shoulder was just dislocated!"

"_You _hit me!"

"You deserved it! Besides, healing charms don't fix everything—it's still stiff."

Lucius began grappling with him, trying to free his wrists. They slid down a bit, each stair punctuated by an obscene protest, before Severus felt himself being flipped over. He struggled wildly, using the wall to brace himself, but Lucius was more built, making it a losing battle. In a final bid for escape, he tried to stand and dart away, but Lucius caught him by the waist, throwing him off balance and causing him to tumble the rest of the way down.

It hurt. A lot. It hurt even more when Lucius followed, landing on top of him.

"Fuck, Lucius. You couldn't have aimed slightly to the left?"

"Now you know what it feels like."

His arms gave a pathetic heave of protest as Lucius captured them, pressing his wrists into the floorboard until he was positive the bones were cracking.

"I'm right. Admit it."

"Will you get off me if I do?"

Rather than answer, Lucius forced his mouth down onto Severus' and made sure to keep him occupied until all sounds of protest had died. The first few seconds sent shooting pain through his spine, making him wonder if he had been seriously injured in the fall, but it disappeared after a moment, first into annoyance that Lucius was trying to use sex to get his way again, and then into enjoyment.

Somewhere in the background, someone muttered, "Oh, God," but he couldn't tell if it was real or imagined until Lucius pulled back and he noticed that Hermione had sunk down on one of the stairs and was now staring at them, cheeks flushed.

She clearly wasn't one of those women who required an hour to prepare—it couldn't have been more than ten minutes, but her hair was pulled back and she was dressed tidily.

Lucius' eyes as he grinned up at her were feral, and Severus couldn't help but be momentarily reminded of his initial jealousy as the thought that this had been a ploy to seduce her a second time. Except that right now it was Lucius who should be jealous.

Lucius liked sex with Hermione; Severus actually liked _Hermione_, and was treading on the dangerously thin line between like and love—if he hadn't already crossed it.

Sometimes he hated Lucius' perceptiveness.

———

Rose was perfectly aware that she wasn't an idiot. She had inherited her mother's grades on top of her father's sense of fun, neatly sidestepping Hermione's obsessive perfectionism and Ron's insensitivity, and ending up with her Aunt Ginny's tendency to run through boyfriends as though they were holey socks instead. Which meant that she knew more about sex than some people insinuated she ought to at her age.

People could insinuate all they liked; she viewed it as knowledge to be applied at some later date.

And, she was frantically trying to apply it now.

Her mother didn't blush; she scowled and barked out orders and occasionally cracked prickly jokes that only people who weren't on the wrong end of her sarcasm found funny, but she never blushed. Then again, she didn't like to think of Hermione of someone who cried either, but only two days before she had clutched Rose with a crushing strength that had kept her from being able to breathe properly for at least an hour as she sobbed into her shoulder.

Rose had wanted to be the one sobbing, not patting her mother comfortingly on the back, but she didn't want to make the situation worse by adding to the hysteria.

So, apparently she hadn't analysed her mother's character nearly as well as she thought she had, but still… Blushing?

Neither one of the two men at the table seemed at all affected: Snape hadn't said anything more involved than, "Pass the salt," and Mr Malfoy was providing entertaining diatribes rife with suggestive comments.

It could be the suggestive comments, she allowed, but they paled in comparison to some of the things that her father had unthinkingly remarked upon, and those had always made her mother irritated, not pink.

Of course, she had been flushed before Rose had arrived for dinner, so he could have said something _really _obscene before then. Nevertheless, it was bewildering, and made her wish that she could leave and go back to her book.

———

Hermione had refolded her clothes and reorganised her suitcase, changed, and was about to crawl into bed when someone knocked on her door. Uncertain what she was expecting, she pulled it open to find Lucius in a dressing gown that covered silk pyjamas.

"Severus and I are having a drink—you can't be going to sleep already."

She shrugged. Although she wasn't particularly tired, it had seemed like a good idea if she was ever going to regain a normal sleep pattern. "I don't have to."

"Of course you don't," he replied reasonably. "Severus and I are having a drink in my study, if you care to join us."

Feeling thoroughly inadequate—cotton was all very well until it was compared to silk—she nodded, snatching her own dressing gown from the bedpost. Lucius led the way, up another flight of stairs and down a series of corridors, to a wing that wasn't visible from the outside. She would have to revise her opinion of the villa's simplicity.

Most of the walk was spent with piqued curiosity and a strange sensation in her chest that she finally diagnosed as anticipation mingled with dread. If anything happened past a few drinks and witty conversation, it wouldn't be accidental, and it certainly wouldn't be spontaneous, making it more difficult to excuse.

And, she realised as he pushed the door to his study open, all the more difficult to refuse.

Severus was already waiting for them, half sprawled in an armchair with a glass of brandy swilling in one hand. His pyjamas, she noted with a tinge of bitterness, were black silk and draped off of him with an annoying flourish that reminded her vaguely of his teaching robes.

"It didn't take you as long as I expected," Severus remarked, voice less sharp than she had grown accustomed to.

"I told you that she wouldn't require convincing."

"It depends what you're convincing me to do," she cut in, wanting to remind them that she wasn't to be taken for granted.

"Enjoy a drink, of course."

She knew better than to accept the bland expression Lucius wore at face value—that would be both dangerous and stupid—but took the glass he offered her and smiled sweetly anyway. If she were to get anything out of this, it wouldn't come by arguing.

Both of them settled into chairs that formed a triangle, and Hermione found herself being eyed warily. Lucius, it seemed, had been expecting some sort of argument and found her sudden docility worrying.

Good.

An uncomfortable silence descended over them, and Severus seemed to suddenly find the rim of his glass fascinating. Hermione wracked her mind trying to find something that wouldn't sound either desperate or superficial, and came back with something that was worse. It was invasive.

"Have you heard anything from Draco about Scorpius' visits?" It really was meant to be a polite inquiry, but she felt her mouth drop open in horror as the words dripped out.

Lucius, fortunately, either didn't mind—unlikely—or noticed her mortification and chose to ignore his twitchy wand hand—lucky—and smiled distractedly. "Nothing yet. I suspect it will take him at least a month to move past his blinding hatred of me to come to a sensible decision."

"I'm sure he doesn't hate you," she replied automatically, then clamped her mouth shut as she remembered the dripping venom with which they had spoken. Perhaps Draco didn't hate Lucius, but there was certainly more bitterness there than he would ever be able to move past.

Lucius chuckled dryly. "Oh, trust me. He does."

It was one of those comments behind which Hermione could hear that there were things he wasn't allowing himself to say, and she waited a moment to see if he would let them out.

Severus spoke before he could. "Are you _trying _to make him hex you to death?"

"Of course not," she replied, trying to work out if he was interfering for her sake or Lucius'. "He doesn't have to answer if he doesn't want to."

She did, however, shut up, more because she knew what it was to not want to be reminded of something than because of Severus' warning. It was, she supposed, a little like facing the dreaded surname question, only worse. Being asked why one wasn't allowed to see his grandchildren both pried into family matters and insinuated some sort of failing as a parent.

And however frequently she thought that he might have failed at humanity during the course of his life, Hermione had to admit that he at least tried to be a father. Besides, as he had pointed out a few days ago as they raced through the Tuscan countryside, things changed.

The last three days, she thought, toying with her locket, were nothing if not testimony to that.

The silence had now shifted to something more companionable, as opposed to awkward. Or perhaps she was reading that into it because she didn't want to make the mistake of prying a second time. She stared into her brandy, swirling it experimentally to avoid looking up at the eyes she knew were on her.

Perhaps she had been wrong to assume, anticipate, even, that drinks would translate into sex. Neither of them seemed to be showing much more than the most polite interest, which confused her. Lucius had been little more than a walking innuendo a couple of hours earlier, and Severus had been…well, displaying that distant coolness that slipped into some sort of emotion every so often that was bewildering enough to make her wonder if there had been something behind Lucius' earlier teasing.

And then there had been that kiss.

She wasn't entirely sure how to explain her reaction to it, only that it had come as completely unexpected and wasn't the sort of thing that she would have assumed made her heart race. One moment, she had been worried about the crashing that threatened to bring down the ceiling, the next she had been half-falling onto a stair….

A few moments passed before it occurred to her that she had frozen in place, as though some part of her assumed that to keep moving would be to give her thoughts away. She glanced up, painfully aware that her cheeks were burning, to see that Lucius and Severus were engaged in their own quiet conversation that she couldn't quite overhear. They broke off when they realised that she was once again paying attention.

"Why don't we take a walk?" she suggested brightly, mentally kicking herself as soon as the words left her mouth. A walk did not quite encompass the sort of exercise that she was contemplating.

The speed with which Severus agreed was almost insulting.

———

Grass tickled the soles of her feet as flipped the slippers off of her feet and wriggled her suddenly free toes. The night air was cool on her face and she gulped deep breaths of it, trying to stop the burning sensation that had hovered just under her skin since dinner.

Lucius watched as Severus followed suit, remarking with a slight shudder, "I've never been able to understand the appeal of bare feet."

Hermione laughed, relishing the cool feeling of dew as she darted out across the lawn. "Obviously you were never a child."

"Of course I wasn't." He looked affronted at the very suggestion. "I don't understand the appeal of that either."

"Even _I _managed to enjoy some of that," Severus called out, surprising her with the sudden flash of humour as he caught up to her and grabbed her by the waist, causing her to shriek, "and I wasn't _allowed _a childhood."

"I thought you spent all your time mooning after redheads." Lucius scowled. "I'm surprised you didn't stalk the Weasleys."

"I was mooning after them without shoes, though. On a playground. You do know what a playground is, don't you?"

"He's sulking," Hermione whispered, just loud enough that her voice would carry. "If he's going to walk with us, he shouldn't be allowed to sulk."

Severus nodded in solemn agreement, the moon causing his eyes to glitter with conspiracy. "Or wear shoes."

"I'm not taking them off," Lucius shouted after them, as Hermione pulled Severus by the wrist and they took off into a run. "Or following you."

They reached the top of one knoll, half-tumbled down the other side, and landed on their feet to keep going. She felt suddenly grateful to the cotton pyjamas—the grass stains didn't matter as much as they would have.

Severus led the way now; she struggled to keep up as they headed toward the vineyards, laughter threatening to bubble up at every step. He stopped abruptly before they entered one of the rows and turned to face her, suddenly grave.

Expectant, she tilted her face up to him, meeting his gaze firmly.

"You know," he said softly, contemplatively, "a lot of what Lucius said is true."

Something lurched in her chest—a combination of panic and bewilderment—but she didn't have time to analyse the feeling because he was kissing her with the same intensity that he had after they had examined the mangled wreck.

———

With a heavy sigh, Lucius lit a cigarette and began to pick his way across the lawn, convinced that the dew was going to destroy all of the careful maintenance that he had Binky lavish on his shoes—he didn't believe in slippers. Severus occasionally grew irritating when he was brooding, but this version of him was far worse—frolicking barefoot into the night indeed.

He, at least, had a sense of decorum, and also enough knowledge of ground-living insects that the thought of exposing his skin to them was repulsive.

As he reached the top of the hill, he sighed a second time at the sight that greeted him, and a thread of smoke swirled and twisted over the scene. It wasn't really that he minded, although the relocation process would be a bit more involved than he would like. By the time that they reached anything resembling a bed, the awkwardness that had settled over them in the study would return and then they would have to start from the beginning again. Which meant that it would be up to him to break the ice.

Not to mention that if Severus truly was as infatuated as he appeared to be, there would be a mess to clean up at the end of the week, and Lucius knew that the brooding would return tenfold.

Still, friends didn't let friends have sex that involved dangerous contact with the elements, and among the many ways that his relationship with Severus could be described, friend certainly qualified. Really, it was his sworn duty. Any benefit that he received from the situation was nothing more than fair payment.

———

Hermione awoke the next morning to a headache and warm bodies on either side of her. The sight of Lucius' nostril greeted her, which was a slightly less pleasant awakening than she had expected.

Closing her eyes, she rolled over to her right side and tried again.

Severus' eyes were already open, and he was propped up on one elbow and watching the two of them with an unreadable expression.

"Good morning," she said, keeping her voice low.

In return he smiled, and she pulled the blankets up around her shoulders. He pushed them back down insistently, touching the locket that sat in the groove of her collarbone.

The terror that clenched in her stomach made her suddenly, painfully aware that he knew nothing about her journey to the Shrieking Shack to recover his body other than what Lucius may or may not have told him and what could be deduced from the hallucination in the ruin. A piece of her insisted that it was wrong he didn't know—without that information, he couldn't possibly understand her reaction to discovering that he was alive.

He certainly wouldn't be able to understand the jolt of relief that shot through her each time she looked at him.

Taking a deep breath, she wrapped her hand around his, careful to include to locket in the mock embrace, and reached her other hand awkwardly behind her neck to undo the clasp. As she did, it transformed back into the vial and she closed his hands around it.

"They're your memories," she whispered, taken aback by the heart-wrenching fear on his face. "Not all of them—just a few that I found on the floor afterwards. I think you lost them accidentally. If you want them, then you can have them back."

He nodded once, quickly, in understanding, before hanging it around his own neck and casting an invisibility charm. "For later."

They gazed at each other mutely until, on her other side, Lucius stirred and pulled her against him with one arm, breaking the moment.

"Touching as this moment has been," he purred, making her wonder how long he had been awake, "I think that it is high time the two of you included me in your exploits."

———

"So, Mum, I really think that you owe me an explanation." Rose was hanging over the edge of the ferry again, but Hermione didn't feel the same alarm. "Or several."

Rose had held off begging for explanations for the final few days of their holiday, a feat that must have required remarkable restraint. Instead, she had contented herself with spending the days curled up with a book in various corners of the estate, pretending that it was an ordinary vacation that had involved nothing more frightening than a trip to the beach and some statue-gazing.

Hermione opened her mouth to speak, then realised that this wasn't a question with a simple answer. In fact, it hadn't been phrased as a question at all. "What would you like to know?"

Rose flung out her arms, causing the first real stab of worry that she had experienced in days. "Anything. Everything. Who was the man who kidnapped us? What happened during the war? Who is Severus Snape, and why isn't he dead?"

The first two questions were easy enough, as long as she could find a starting point—and there were many of them. For her, the war had begun the second she received her Hogwarts letter, although she hadn't known it then. It was the beginning of her exposure to the prejudice that she wouldn't have experienced otherwise, a prelude to the events of her first year at Hogwarts, when Harry would face Quirrell and apparently kill him.

She would meet Ron, and they would loathe each other—perhaps it had been an early signal not to attempt anything further than friendship.

She would meet Severus, and loathe him as well, but that would be tempered by respect that would only grow.

Somewhere in there, she would have to explain Albus Dumbledore, whose threads of deception had stretched across the decades and nearly resulted in the loss of Rose. That part, perhaps, would be the most difficult; the mere thought of it nearly blinded her with rage.

The third question was more difficult. It was a story that would start over thirty years before hers, and appear to conclude twenty-five years ago—a false ending with a snake attack, to which Al was an epilogue. Truthfully, though, it wasn't over yet, and there were so many things to include. Entangled in his story was that of almost everyone that she had ever known—she and Lucius were only a small part of that—but they didn't entirely define who he was, only what. It didn't encompass the act of selfishness that had transformed into a lifetime of bravery, or the overwhelming affection that she had learned to associate with him in the last week. The complete vulnerability he had shown, asking her if she would visit over Christmas, to which she knew that the only possible answer was yes.

The man was a study in emotional impressions.

"Mum?" Rose said, prodding her arm insistently. "You are going to tell me, aren't you? If you don't, I'll tell Dad that you shagged Scorpius' grandfather."

Hermione's head jerked up rapidly enough that it momentarily seemed she had caused a concussion. "I did not!"

Her daughter rolled her eyes, tossing her hair over her shoulder. For the first time, Hermione noticed a green silk scarf that fluttered in the breeze. "Do you honestly think I'm that stupid? Mum, you blushed for three days straight, and I obviously can't tell him that you slept with Mr Snape, because he's technically dead. Sort of."

"You will do no such thing," Hermione snapped, not sure whether she ought to be more worried about the fact that her daughter was blackmailing her, or that she hadn't been concerned about her daughter noticing in the first place.

Rose smiled ruefully. "Of course I won't. It would be worse than the time last summer he caught me out with Jason Fletchly."

Hermione's eyes widened with shock. "_What_?"

With a shrug, she said, "I suppose that means that he didn't tell you. Oops."

"You were _fifteen!_"

"Nearly sixteen, and we'd been seeing each other for over a year. You're trying to distract me again, and it isn't going to work."

Trying in vain to ignore the voice in the back of her mind that was reminding her that Rose had grown up when she hadn't been looking, Hermione sighed. "I'm not sure where to begin."

Rose stepped away from the railing and stared piercingly at Hermione. "Start with the part that matters the most to you. Or, at least, one of those parts. You can explain from there."

She nodded, her mind already springing to a room filled with damaged furniture and half-dried blood smeared across the floor. Not, perhaps, the most historically important moment, but it was significant.

"And hurry up," Rose insisted, "because I still need to tell you about how we sawed through the wall with a butter knife."


End file.
